Be Alert – Seeing God in the Universe - The Four Barriers to Finding God

Jeremiah 33:14-16; Psalm 25:1-10; 1 Thessalonians 3:9-13; Luke 21:25-36

The other day, I looked at the sky. There was a single cloud floating in a wonderful blue, featureless void. The grass was green – the trees were brown and gray. The sun lit the whole scene up in a yellow-gold light. A gentle wind was blowing and a small bird was chasing a red-tailed hawk that was trying to make his escape, like a B-52 being attacked by an F-16. And all I could hear was the gentle whisper of the leaves moving across the yard.

At that moment, my mind’s eye saw something else. There was a Presence with me, a gentle Voice that stood and whispered in my ear – “Be Alert – the Best is yet to come!” And I knew that my oldest friend was with me, the Holy Spirit of God, the gentle breath of God that blows upon the earth and speaks to those of us who listen. You see, the presence of God is all around us if you simply take time to look for God, to be alert, to listen for the gentle voice of the Holy Spirit. Whenever you see something beautiful, you can be sure that God has been there, for Beauty is found in nature and in godly people, while ugly is confined to self-absorbed people and their works. Perhaps more than anything else, Beauty – real beauty, the deep, deep soul-filling, life-giving beauty, tells us where God is in action. Ugliness, decay, corruption, death are places where we find evil.

I can tell you why a rainbow looks the way it looks, but I cannot tell you why we consider it beautiful, except that our Creator loves beauty. And the same thing applies to a beautiful mountain, covered with beautiful fall leaves or even covered with new-fallen snow or green in the summer. The mountain is beautiful, but the only reason must be that our Creator loves beauty. And the same thing applies to the deadly coral reef, beautiful, yet deadly to people, who can step on a fish and die in 30 seconds from the fishes’ sting. Beauty tells us that God is around – stay alert.

And coincidence does the same. One special event when two great things happen just right is a coincidence. But to those who believe, we know that those coincidences that happen over and over again, that happen weekly, even daily are no coincidences, but are instead the fingerprints of our God making our life safer and better and good for us. Watch out for those coincidences – stay alert – God is working in your life. As David wrote in the Psalm: “In you, Lord my God, I put my trust.”

If you are a believer, you know what I mean, for you have put your trust in God. But if you are not a believer, at this point, I’d like to let you know where the exits are, since you probably are looking for the exits, for we are talking about the supernatural, and the supernatural makes many people uncomfortable.

Here in this place, most of the people around you truly believe that the Universe was created by a supremely wise, all-powerful, all-loving God who pays personal attention to us, a Being that is beyond nature, the Being that created Nature. And I recognize that you may be one of those few people here who do not believe this. Today, I’m going to talk about why Christians believe there is a Creator God, and more importantly, the barriers to believing that we put in front of ourselves.

If you are a believer, I’m sure you have some friends, neighbors, or family members who do NOT believers. In fact, I’ve asked you to make a list of a dozen people outside the church who are not believers. I’ve asked you to pray for them to come to know the Lord, and I’ve asked you to try to praise God to them each time you see them. But you will notice that I have not asked you to invite these people to church – that will come much later. And so, this sermon will hopefully help you as you talk to people who do not believe in a Creator God. As Paul wrote in his letter to the Thessalonians:

12 May the Lord make your love increase and overflow for each other and for everyone else, just as ours does for you. 13 May he strengthen your hearts so that you will be blameless and holy in the presence of our God and Father when our Lord Jesus comes with all his holy ones.

First of all, I’d like to tell you a bit about myself. I once was an atheist, a young man who did not believe in any God. I earned a degree in Physics, focused upon astrophysics, the study of the stars and the planets and the galaxies, and how they formed and developed. When you think about the scientific atheist, I was that person. So I know many of the questions you have, and most of the reasons people don’t believe. I’ll be happy to tell you my story and why I changed my mind about God sometime when you’ve got a half hour to listen, perhaps here at the church or at your home, or at McDonald’s. 

At first glance, it looks like there are dozens of different reasons why people don’t believe in God. But it is much simpler than that. There are really only four reasons why people don’t believe in God – Barriers that keep them from seeing Christ. – 

1. They don’t trust Christians. 
2. They see no need for God in their lives. 
3. They’ve decided that Christianity is no help with their problems, and finally, 
4. They see no hurry to become believers.

So the first barrier that people need to cross is a high stone wall labeled “I don’t trust any Christians”, and in order to cross that wall, they will need a trustworthy someone whose shoulders they can climb on and that trustworthy soul is you. Before anyone can trust in God, he or she must first trust a prophet of God – one who speaks for God – in short, a Christian.

We look around and we see the people around us as the only people in the world that we do trust, so we wonder why people can’t trust Christians. We have to understand why people trust some people and don’t trust others. People trust people who never hurt them, they trust people who love them, they trust people who are truthful, they trust people who have a proven record of being right.

Unfortunately, for many people, they have never met any mature Christians. Oh, it’s easy to find a Christian – just not a mature Christian. You see, most Christians are still in the disciple stage, the learning stage, where they are still hurting people as often as they are helping people, where they are still hating people as often as they are loving people, where they exaggerate things to make a point, and where they repeat things they have heard other immature Christians claim, things which have been shown to be wrong. In short, if there were a truth-in-labeling law for people, most of the people who claim to be Christians walking around in America should instead be labeled as “people learning to be Christians”. And so, our immature Christians often give Christ a bad name. They are like skinny, weak people who our friend begins to climb on, but they are so weak that they wobble and our friend falls to the ground, in worse shape than before they started to climb up and over the wall of trust.

The mature Christians, on the other hand, have worked long and hard at controlling their tongues. They have learned not to complain about others, they have learned to give other people grace, to help others understand the actions of the rude, the hurtful, the mean-spirited, the hypocritical, and they do not fall into these traps themselves. In short, they have practiced becoming holy – set apart for God and God’s purposes. They control what they say about others, and they limit what they claim for Christ, for there are many people who left Christianity when they prayed as a young child for a pet – or a grandmother – and then the pet or Grandma died despite their prayers. The mature Christian knows that God’s will is supreme, and that God may choose to save our loved one – or not – according to God’s purposes, and so mature Christians do not make promises for God which God may not choose to keep.

Mature Christians are never mean-spirited, and the mean spirit can apply to claims about science and other belief systems as well as about specific people. After all, if you believe that rubbing blue mud into your bellybutton on Wednesday mornings is the way to God, you will not trust me if I laugh at you, will you? And so when the immature Christian makes claims about science and scientists that are mocking – or worse yet – completely wrong – it does not help the cause when speaking to a scientist about a Creator God. Mature Christians, you see, are solid, strong, and stable. When another starts to climb on them to see over the wall of trust, they are like rocks of granite – strong, supportive, trustworthy. Are you strong and supportive and trustworthy for your unbelieving friends?

And so the first thing we work upon is to be trustworthy people in front of others. We must develop that trust over the weeks and months and years of a relationship – for example with the dozen people on your list. And this is not in the least bit a deceptive practice, for this is how we are supposed to be as Christians. In fact, we are to pray to become holy. As Paul wrote in I Thessalonians 3:13 “And may he so strengthen your hearts in holiness that you may be blameless before our God and Father at the coming of our Lord Jesus with all his saints.“ We are not supposed to pretend to be trustworthy, but we are indeed supposed to be trustworthy people.

To share the Gospel, we must be trustworthy people and we must show love and understanding and joy and wisdom in all we do. What habits do you have that you need to pray for God to remove, that you need to work upon, that you need to destroy from your person so that you will be holy and blameless and trustworthy so that people will see in you the character of the Son of God standing before them? The Holy Spirit will guide you if you will listen to the Spirit. You must grow to the point where they can at least catch a glimpse of Christ shining through your smile, and then they will begin to trust what you say. Lift your friends up and help them to safely cross the Wall of Trust.

The second barrier to seeing God is when a person feels that they have no need for God in their lives. This barrier stands in front of them like a moat filled with crocodiles a hundred yards wide and they don’t want to get wet. For most people, a discussion of God is simply an intellectual exercise. It is a philosophical debate, a question similar to the other questions that will simply not matter in your life such as “How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?” or “Does life exist on other planets?” or “What is the price of eggs in China this week?” For most people, particularly people who are successful in life, these questions and the question of God’s existence are simply not important, and it doesn’t matter to them what the answer is. And so they can hold a discussion or debate and they believe the answer is meaningless in their lives. And so they will argue with you and simply work to score debating points - the issue never touches them personally. And so they stand on the shore of the moat and politely decline to cross the Moat of Need.

But for some people, the question of God’s existence has become very important. God has lit a fire behind them and that fire pushed them toward the Moat of Need where they must swim - or die on the shore. When you are lying in a hospital bed undergoing chemotherapy for Stage IV cancer, it really matters to you whether or not God exists, because you need to know what will happen to you if the poisons being dripped into your body fail to stop the killer. When your mother or father or child is lying in the hospital bed, you really want to know if God is real, for you want to know if you will see your dying loved one again in a few years. When you lose the career you’ve been working at for a decade or more, and when you have to start all over because of a bad marriage, it really helps to know what we are working for, why we are suffering, whether love is worthwhile.

And millions of people have recently begun to try to answer this question, because it really matters whether the God of Christianity is real, the God of Islam is real, whether they are both real or whether they are both simply pleasant ideas, for ultimately the answer to that question will decide what your actions in today’s world will be – will you follow the teachings of Christ, the teachings of Mohammed, the teachings of those who deny both, or the teachings of those who actually deny both because they claim that both are real? It affects our actions in today’s society.

And so, for your friends, be close enough to your friends - in particular your dozen friends - that you will know when they begin to wonder what is important in this life, whether God exists or not. It is important to be there, ready to speak of God, to help your friend see that the real reason they are so fearful about death is because they don’t know if God exists or not, the real reason they are so frightened about being alone is because they have never felt the presence of God, the real reason they are worried about their money is because they have always depended upon themselves and they have never learned to depend upon God. Help them know that they need help outside themselves, help them to learn to jump into the Moat of Need, for that is the second barrier they need to cross to find God. As David wrote in his psalm: 9 He guides the humble in what is right and teaches them his way. People must get humble before they will look for God! And once they are humbled, they will run across the Moat of Need, running across the backs of the crocodiles to get to the other side!

The third barrier all people must cross is the tall, razor-wire Fence of believing that God is of no help to us in our time of trouble. If you have lost your job, you feel trapped by the Fence of No Help. If your car is being repossessed, you are looking for cash, not a bible study. If you have just been told you have breast cancer, you are looking for a choice surgeon - not a church sanctuary. Yet, as David wrote to God:

2 I trust in you;
do not let me be put to shame,
nor let my enemies triumph over me.
3 No one who hopes in you
will ever be put to shame,

As we know, God is the answer to people’s problems because…God is always the answer to all of our problems. There is something that frees our emotion from the tremendous weight we carry when we turn over our burden to God. Our spirit floats free, our soul rises high, we cry out of the depths and God’s voice comes back – “I’m here and I can handle your problems”, like hooking up the Goodyear blimp to a single concrete block that we can barely carry ourselves, God lifts us up as high over the Fence as we need to be lifted.

But to our friend who doesn’t believe, we are asking the impossible. When you are in a hole, looking at your feet, it is very difficult to see the Goodyear blimp. And so, we have to tell stories, true stories, believable stories, wonderful stories of how God acted in our lives, how God acted in our friends’ lives, how God has acted throughout time, and every one of those stories needs to be true, vetted for accuracy, unexaggerated, and told with passion, in earnest, and with a solid look into our friend’s eyes so that they will know that as far as we are concerned, God acted for us and saved us once, or twice, or three times.

We have to truly be witnesses of the good that God and Christ have done in our lives. Through our true stories, Christ’s body will walk once again on earth as He appears in the other person’s mind when you tell that story and they hear and imagine what happened to you that night you prayed for help. And so you need to tell many people - a dozen, twenty, fifty people - the stories about what God has done for you so that you will become good at telling the story for the one time it saves another persons’ eternal soul and sets the angels singing praises in Heaven.

And so, with your help and the stories you tell, your friend can reluctantly clear the third barrier, the tall, razor-wire fence labeled “God is no help”, for you will have provided a balloon labeled “Look what God did for Me!”

And then, standing before them is the fourth and final barrier, the great final barrier of excuses, the barrier of fear, the barrier of taking a few more days to think about it, the barrier of procrastination, the barrier of thinking there is no hurry. It is like an obstacle course filled with rings and jungle gyms and robe ladders and zip lines and trees to climb and concrete tubes to crawl through. And yet, you must help them to get through this obstacle course. As Jesus said,

34 “Be careful, or your hearts will be weighed down with carousing, drunkenness and the anxieties of life, and that day will close on you suddenly like a trap. 35 For it will come on all those who live on the face of the whole earth. 36 Be always on the watch, and pray that you may be able to escape all that is about to happen, and that you may be able to stand before the Son of Man.”

You know when a person is ready to believe when they begin asking you detailed questions about your faith, about God, and about Christian ideas. When someone asks you to explain how the world was created in seven days – that person is ready to believe in God. When someone says they can’t believe in a God that would order the killing of innocent women and children, your friend is ready to become a Christian. When someone asks whether or not you think that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene, you have someone who desperately wants to believe and find the answers to all their questions.

Our natural tendency is to become defensive, to cut and run, to get angry with them. But that’s because we think they are attacking us. They may look like they are attacking, it may feel to you like they are attacking, but that isn’t what is happening. What’s happening in their mind is very subtle, and it may be happening in some of your minds here today. Here is what is happening:

Every person understands deep down in their heart, perhaps below their conscious mind that believing in God has real consequences in our lives. You see, if we say we don’t believe in God, that means that we are the little-g god of our Universe. We are completely in control, we don’t have to listen to our mothers and fathers, we don’t have to do things we don’t want to do, and we get to stay up late, eat ice cream, and watch anything we want to watch on TV.

But if we accept that God exists, we believe that there is a price to be paid. That price we believe is that we owe God a debt for creating us, and if we owe God that debt, then we believe we will have to change our daily actions in some way. The changes we think we will have to make depend completely upon who we are and what we are doing that is in rebellion to our view of what God desires of us. For example, we may have grown up with the idea that Christians don’t drink, we like to drink, and therefore we believe that if we become Christians we’ll have to stop drinking. Or we may believe that being intimate outside of marriage is wrong, but we do it and we like doing it, and we are afraid that God will call us on the carpet for this. Or perhaps we just like sleeping in on Sunday mornings and we’re afraid that accepting God means we have to get out of bed early on Sunday mornings. It can be as simple as that.

The real problem, you see, is that we want to be in control of our Universe – our entire Universe – and we don’t even like the idea that a God may exist who has the right to tell us what to do and the power to make us behave. And so we rebel and we offer up all sorts of excuses which keep us from coming to God, even though we know that we need God and we know that God will help us. And we really have a hard time believing that the real price has been paid, and Christianity truly is the gateway to freedom. But the price has been paid by Jesus Christ two thousand years ago and our freedom is there waiting for us to pick it up out of God's metaphorical hands. But we still think we owe a debt.

And so we ask about whether or not Ezekiel saw aliens when he saw the wheels in the sky and we ask if a whale could actually have swallowed Jonah, and we ask if Jesus could actually have been a Hindu holy man who was misunderstood and we look like a fish on a hook slowly being reeled in, but we fight, we fight, we fight every foot.

I have most of the answers to most of these questions that people pose and probably fifty more, and I’ll be available to answer questions, any questions you might have because I had to have most of them answered myself, for I took a LONG time to reel in. Feel free to send me a question in the comments if you want, or via Facebook or email.

You see, you can lead your friend over the obstacles, through the concrete tubes, down the zip lines, and through every one of the barriers he or she wants to put in God’s way. But the simplest way to handle all of these endless questions is to walk around the obstacle course. Be honest with your friend to help them face the truth about how they are avoiding God. Try gently using this general answer for all of these questions:

“My friend, you already know that God exists, you already know you need God. These questions are small questions which my pastor answers all the time. Look around – there is a beautiful world around us, and I’ve told you stories of how I’ve seen God in action. Our world is a world that people are messing up, not God. Would you like to get into a good relationship with God right now and join a group of people who are working to take hate and destruction and death out of the world with God’s help?"

If so, repeat after me the following prayer:

Lord God,

I’ve messed up in this life and now I believe you exist.

Please forgive me, and help me in my life.

I pray this….in the name of Jesus Christ. Amen.

And so you’ve looked over the wall of Trust, swam the Moat of Need, floated over the fence of God’s Help, and walked around the obstacle course of Delay to reach God on this side.

Are there other reasons we think that God exists and that Christianity is true? Yes, of course. In fact, we have about seven or eight other reasons which I can talk about in some detail, (and do in my book "What do Evangelical Christians Believe?", which is found on Amazon.)

· First of all, there is the consistent testimony of the 66 books of the Bible, written by over 30 authors over a period of 1200 years. All are consistent in their narration of who God is, and the character of God. And we have many reasons we believe that the Bible is a trustworthy account of the life of Jesus Christ and what Jesus said.

· Second, there are the philosophical ideas that all things have a cause, or are set in motion by some other object or some force. Christians refer to God as the First Cause, the Cause that set into motion the Big Bang, the Creation of the Universe.

· Third, there is the moral argument that around the world, no matter where people are located, there is the concept of murder, the concept of marriage, the concept of theft, and many other legal, moral, and ethical concepts. The details differ from place to place, but all groups of people have these concepts, which points to there being some common origin of these concepts. Christians, Jews, and Moslems all point to the origin of these concepts as being the God who contacted Moses in the desert.

· Fourth, there is the logical concept first put forth by St Anselm in the 11th century, that since God is imagined to be a perfect Being, if God were not to exist, this would be imperfect, and a contradiction, so God must exist. An updated version of the argument is that if we admit that in some possible Universe God exists, then God exists in all Universes because God is powerful enough to move between Universes. I know – only a student of logic or math would love this argument, but it works for some people.

· Fifth, the argument from design points out that some things are so complex and require so many parts to have evolved simultaneously to be of any use, such as the eye, or the immune system, or even the existence of human beings on this planet, that a Designer must have manipulated things.

· Sixth, the very existence of consciousness proves that there is something beyond purely natural processes from a chemical soup involved in life, and the fact of our self-awareness means that there is something more to you and me than just the automatic reactions of a couple of pounds of wet cells. In other words, the fact that the mind is more than just the brain implies that there is something beyond physics, chemistry, and biology in this world. Which leads to…

· Seven – If you accept any supernatural idea at all – a mind, a soul, ghosts, life after death, angels, magic, spells, zombies, telepathy, miracles, Beauty, Justice, Righteousness, Mathematics, giving thanks, whatever – then this automatically should lead you to accept the existence of a supernatural Creator God, for the supernatural ideas that you cannot touch and feel and smell and taste and hear such as the perfect 90 degree angles found only in the ideas of geometry cannot come from the strictly natural. They require something supernatural – something found in the world of ideas at least.

But for me and billions of other people, the most compelling reason that I have that God exists is that I have seen God work directly in my life and in the lives of people around me. The number of coincidences has become truly astounding – and remember, my background is in hard science, mathematics, and statistics.

My final thoughts on this are these:

If the Christian God exists, the existence of this most loving yet powerful Being changes absolutely everything for anyone who is truly honest with themselves and sees the world around them. If the Christian God exists, our daily concepts of living and what happens after our physical death need to change and this God needs to become the center of our lives. You can’t really believe in God and then ignore God’s existence daily. But many people try. Are you one of those people?

And if the Christian God does not exist, then a tremendous number of the greatest and best minds of the Western world have fallen for a great scam – people like Galileo, Newton, Lincoln, Washington, Churchill, Harper Lee, Blaise Pascal, Rene Descartes, Larry Niven, dozens of Popes, Augustine of Hippo, Francis of Assisi, Maya Angelou, and millions of others. Humankind would save many resources if you could prove that they were all wrong.

Either way, the question is worth spending some serious time on – it is worth gathering all the evidence to make up your mind about. The question is important!

For when Jesus Christ of Nazareth claimed to be God Himself walking on the earth, He did so repeatedly and the crowed recognized this. This was the reason he was executed – for claiming to be God! And so He was either a liar, a lunatic, or the Lord of the Universe. The evidence that He existed is far too strong to say He did not exist, and we cannot say that He was just a very wise and good moral teacher, for wise and good moral teachers do not lie about critical claims and lunatics do not make as much sense as Jesus did, and so we left to face His claim to be God Himself – which is exactly the question He wants each of us to face.

So be alert – look around you for signs that God exists and point them out to yourself – and to your friends, your neighbors, and your families as we look forward to the Day of Christ’s Arrival into the world…and each of our lives.

The End of Everything - The Kingship of Jesus Christ and Thanksgiving

II Samuel 23:1-7; Daniel 7:9-10, 13-14; Psalm 93; Revelation 1:4-8; John 18:33-37

In a few days, we will celebrate that most Christian of all holidays as we gather together with friends and family and talk about all that we have to be thankful for around some turkey and dressing and gravy and mashed potatoes and pumpkin pie. The devil is only invited to this holiday in the form of eggs – Even now, people are shopping for ingredients for our favorite dishes and, you know, I really think that perhaps a few less stores are open this Thanksgiving than last year.

I sometimes hear a person declare themselves to not believe in God. But then, this person celebrates Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving is a holiday where we give thanks - but Who do we give thanks to if not God? A wise young child said, "they give thanks to themselves!" when I asked this question. Who will you give thanks to?

On Wednesday, we will hear the kitchen timer go off and that is the signal, for it means that the first pies and cookies are coming out of the oven ready for Thursday, Thanksgiving Day. Even my son in China is planning to eat turkey with friends at his girlfriend’s apartment. Of course, having turkey, the King of Birds, in China is trickier than in America since almost no apartments are equipped with ovens – a deluxe cooking stove in China is one with two burners. And so my son and his girlfriend are paying $150 for a service to roast and deliver the turkey to her apartment and they hope to recover some of the money from their friends…Turkey is such an American thing.

Microwaves have their place, but there is something about the oven on Thanksgiving morning that is special. Perhaps that’s why every year our family has a tradition, a tradition developed over the years out of necessity, a tradition to avoid a late discovery when the dishes are being washed up, a tradition of just before grace is said, someone says, “Mother, what did you forget in the microwave?” For there is always a bowl of buttered cauliflower, or something forgotten in the microwave or the refrigerator because the oven and the King of Birds is what is important on Thanksgiving Day.

And here we are, sitting here on Sunday morning as ever, awaiting God. Here we are, listening to God’s Holy Word, spoken by people of various abilities, but all of whom love the Lord. Here we are, sitting among friends, singing hymns, in light that is dim, awaiting Him.

And a voice says to me…will this be the Day? Will this be the Day that He returns. Will this be the Day when the sky is rolled up like a scroll, the Day when the trumpet sounds, the day when Jesus Christ arrives in clouds with the glory and majesty of God?

King David was beloved by God. And God spoke to David and told David that his descendents would rule a kingdom without end. A son of David would always be the rightful, true and proper ruler of the world. And when a member of David’s house”...rules over people in righteousness,
when he rules in the fear of God,
4 he is like the light of morning at sunrise
on a cloudless morning,
like the brightness after rain
that brings grass from the earth.’

Have you seen that brightness after the rain? The rain falls and then the cloud moves on, and the tender grass sparkles in the bright sunshine from the rain that fell as new lift moves into the grass and the grass gives life to the animals that dine on it and through those animals – deer, sheep, cattle – we have new life and the world is at peace and we are filled and everything is good.

But men of evil, David said, are different:

6 But evil men are all to be cast aside like thorns,
which are not gathered with the hand.
7 Whoever touches thorns
uses a tool of iron or the shaft of a spear;
they are burned up where they lie.”

The evil men are to be dealt with as you would a thornbush. An iron brush hook, a spear shaft, a sickle, a scythe, an instrument of iron is used to keep the evil at a distance and let it burn up in the hot sun, away from the life of the rain, the living water that gives all life.

Life or death? That is the choice. To love righteousness or to love evil. One gives life. One gives death. That is the choice. Follow a life-giving son of David, or be dealt with as a thornbush is dealt with - struck with iron or a spear, and left to burn. Life or death.

Many years after David, the prophet Daniel had a vision. He had a vision of four beasts, four great kingdoms that grew and died. And when the final one was growing, the leader spoke against God and the Holy People of God, and then Daniel saw God in God’s throne room:

“As I looked,
thrones were set in place,
and the Ancient of Days took his seat.
His clothing was as white as snow;
the hair of his head was white like wool.
His throne was flaming with fire,
and its wheels were all ablaze.
10 A river of fire was flowing,
coming out from before him.
Thousands upon thousands attended him;
ten thousand times ten thousand stood before him.
The court was seated,
and the books were opened."

The Celestial Court is now in session. God pronounced judgment, and the leader was destroyed and the kingdom is given over to God’s Holy People:

13 “In my vision at night I looked, and there before me was one like a son of man, coming with the clouds of heaven. He approached the Ancient of Days and was led into his presence. 14 He was given authority, glory and sovereign power; all nations and peoples of every language worshiped him. His dominion is an everlasting dominion that will not pass away, and his kingdom is one that will never be destroyed.
And so the people of God for centuries wondered: Who is this king of glory? Who is this man who is like a son of man? Who is this man who will be given authority, glory and sovereign power? Who will have this everlasting kingdom?

David had been promised an everlasting kingdom. The one who rules must be a son of David, a descendent of David, a man who can trace His ancestry to David, the righteous king of Israel.

But who would that be?

And so, the morning he was crucified, we have recorded a dialogue between Jesus of Nazareth and Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor of Jerusalem and Judea.

33 Pilate then went back inside the palace, summoned Jesus and asked him, “Are you the king of the Jews?”

34 “Is that your own idea,” Jesus asked, “or did others talk to you about me?”

35 “Am I a Jew?” Pilate replied. “Your own people and chief priests handed you over to me. What is it you have done?”

36 Jesus said, “My kingdom is not of this world. If it were, my servants would fight to prevent my arrest by the Jewish leaders. But now my kingdom is from another place.”

37 “You are a king, then!” said Pilate.

Jesus answered, “You say that I am a king. In fact, the reason I was born and came into the world is to testify to the truth. Everyone on the side of truth listens to me.”

When Jesus says, “You say that I am a king”, he uses the Greek word “legeis”, which is a variation of “lego”. Lego means to lay it on the table, to slap down the final card, to make a final strong statement. Jesus is saying: "Pilate, you have made the final statement in the argument. You have spoken the truth, you have cut to the chase, you have completely finished the discussion, for you have declared me to be a king and this is why I was born and came into the world. To be a king and to be the witness to the truth."

Jesus’ mission was now complete. Not only was Pilate about to pronounce the execution of a completely innocent man, who was not guilty of any crime, but Pilate was now about to kill a king, a foreign king, a king who was entitled to diplomatic treatment and not death, for even the Romans believed in the proper treatment of foreign kings. (Of course, they reserved the right to manipulate and mess with kings of lands they had conquered.) Jesus had just answered Pilate’s question, told him that he was the king of this world – (Kosmos), Pilate had stated in agreement that Jesus was a king, and in a few minutes Pilate would wash his hands and have Jesus the king executed for the crime of claiming to be God.

Never was there such a mistake made by a man. There has never been such a dangerous diplomatic blunder made in all of history. No ambassador has ever made such a terrible mistake as was made that day by a man who should have know better, as when Pilate chose to execute the king from outside the kosmos, the Son of God, for the crime of claiming to be God.

For you see, men may die and men may be executed. But despite what some philosophers claim, God does not die, and God has the power to set the cosmos right. And so it has happened, it is happening, and it will happen.

We know from eyewitnesses that that afternoon, Friday afternoon, Jesus was executed by crucifixion. We know from eyewitnesses that His bleeding, speared body was taken down and placed in a rock tomb by a wealthy member of the Jerusalem religious council, that a huge rock was placed in front of the tomb in a trench, and that Pilate’s seal was placed on the tomb with a 16 man guard to protect the tomb from tampering.

And we know from eyewitnesses that beginning early Sunday morning, some women, then some men, then two different men on the road, then a large group of disciples in a sealed, locked room, another group of fishermen, and then over five hundred people saw Jesus alive again, eating and teaching and walking with them. It is a difficult thing to permanently kill the Son of God!

And then, about 35 years later, the Romans destroyed Jerusalem. And about 20 years after that, John sat down and wrote once more. John wrote of a vision of Jesus that had been sent to him, and John wrote of a message that he had been given by Jesus, the son of man, the Son of God, to the seven large churches in western Turkey, and through them, John wrote to us…

“Grace and peace to you from him who is, and who was, and who is to come, and from the sevenfold spirit before his throne, 5 and from Jesus Christ, who is the faithful witness, the firstborn from the dead, and the ruler of the kings of the earth.”

The message comes from the “ruler of the kings of the earth”, Jesus Christ. And what is the message that John is delivering to us?

7 “Look, he is coming with the clouds,”
and “every eye will see him,
even those who pierced him”;
and all peoples on earth “will mourn because of him.”
So shall it be! Amen.

8 “I am the Alpha and the Omega,” says the Lord God, “who is, and who was, and who is to come, the Almighty.”

It is a vision of the end of time. It is God and Christ returned to take possession of the world that rejected the son of man. The Son of God has returned with the power of His true kingdom to rule this world that preferred Rome. He has come to demand obedience where before He simply asked for followers. He has come in wrath where before He came in love. He has come to bring an end to all things where before He came to bring life to all. He has come to put an end to everything. “And all peoples on earth “will mourn because of him.” So shall it be. Amen.”

From David to Daniel was 400 years. From Daniel to Jesus was 600 years. From Jesus to John’s Revelation was 60 years. And from John’s Revelation til today was 1900 years. Over nearly 3000 years, men and women have been predicting the arrival of God’s Kingdom in full glory and majesty. For nearly 3000 years, an increasing number of people have come to realize that the kings of the world need a wise ruler over them. And for almost 2000 of those years, one name has been proposed: Jesus the Christ, the son of man, and the Son of God.

Our world is once more falling into ruin. It has fallen before and it will fall again. After David’s son Solomon ruled, the great kingdom that David ruled fell apart, split, and began a slow death spiral, ending in the conquest that took Daniel as a young man to Babylon. After Daniel, Ezra, Nehimiah, and then the Mccabee family resurrected the Jewish kingdom once more. Herod the Great rebuilt the Temple of Solomon. And then the Romans destroyed Jerusalem, and then the Romans were destroyed by the Huns and the surviving Eastern empire was eventually destroyed by the French. The great civilization of the French was destroyed by the Germans, the Germans by the British and the Americans, and now we wait, and wonder, and while our country stands on top today, we wonder – will Moslem civilization destroy the great British-American civilization, or will something else happen?

Each of those civilizations flourished as they stayed focused upon God. Each of them died as they mostly forgot God. And so we stand at the threshold – will America and Britain rediscover God or will we gradually forget God over the next two generations?

Perhaps we have time to turn things around. Perhaps we don’t. Paris has forgotten God and Christ and we have seen the effects as the hatred between different groups of people split mainly by heritage, color, language, and even religion has become stronger than the love of Christ for all men and women. I fear that France is about to descend into civil war, a war of hatred as Frenchmen, fearful of Moslems persecute Moslems, and Moslems, full of anger toward Frenchmen kill Frenchmen. And without Christ, the cycle of violence will grow and grow until a full-scale civil war breaks out. Will we be the next ones to become trapped in the cycle?

Or will we teach our friends, our neighbors, and our family what it means to love Christ by our examples? Will we welcome the family of another religion – or no religion - to our table and attempt to win them to Christ, not through coercion or guilt or declaration of their sins, but through love and joy and sweetness and the careful telling of the stories of those times that God made God’s presence known to us and saved us from disaster? Will we be able to inoculate this town against violence because all people, Christian, Moslem, Hindu, and atheist understand that the Christian people of our churches love all people and welcome all people, and want to share the love of their God with everyone because we truly care for their souls?

Of course, we may begin to do this and not have time.

It is easy to become so focused upon ISIS as the potential agent who destroys our world of peace that we forget that there is another who is far, far, far more powerful than ISIS.

For the King is coming. He is coming in power – and in wrath. This Thanksgiving dinner may be our last before Jesus returns. Will this be the Day when the trumpet call over powers the ring of the kitchen timer?

When you sit down to eat, consider before you pray reading one of today’s readings. Look around you at the table. Are all the people ready for the King’s arrival? Or do you have friends or love ones who may be forgotten, like a bowl of buttered cauliflower that is still waiting in the microwave, left behind and forgotten because the main event has arrived, the King has returned. If you’ve left people in the spiritual microwave, take some time during or after dinner to speak with them of the King who has made you thankful, the King who rules your life with joy, the King who will return to conquer through force those who did not choose to follow him.

If Jesus does not return, we’ll be here next Sunday to begin the Advent season, that time of joyful preparation for the arrival of the King at Christmas time. Our upcoming sermon series will be focused on helping you explain our Christian faith, upon finding God, understanding how God can help us find what is right and wrong, how God can lift us up and yet keep our arrogance in check, and on why God is important in everyone’s life. And then finally, on Christmas eve, we will tell the story of Jesus Christ once again. This is a great time of the year to invite people to church, especially with the revival of the spirit that hit us last weekend. They will get answers to their questions. Do not leave your friends in the spiritual microwave.

Gifts, Anyone? - Thoughts on the Paris Shootings

Daniel 12:1-3; Psalm 16; Hebrews 10:11-25; Mark 13:1-8

In ancient Israel, there were many people who were satisfied with their lives. Most of the people understood what their lives were about, and they were mostly satisfied with those lives.

I’m not saying that their lives were satisfactory by our standards, for they worked hard and mostly lived short lives full of very hard work. The average lifespan was between 30 and 40 years, with many children dying before their 5th birthday.

But there is a certain adaptability to the human race. We are very, very good at taking the hands we are dealt and making the best of it. If we find ourselves struggling to survive on an acre of dry land, we will struggle. If we find that we have been born with a silver spoon in our mouth, we will learn to deal with it. Most people can easily become satisfied however they live unless they listen carefully to what the Word of God tells them and the Holy Spirit, who want us to be afflicted and convicted of this life and grow closer to God – something which can be very upsetting.

Afflicted and convicted by God? Afflicted means you feel like someone is poking you with a sharp stick. Convicted by God means you’ve listened to the Holy Spirit and you’ve realized that you are lacking something. And so God offers us gifts from time to time – Gifts of affliction and conviction, gifts to receive which mean we often must stand up from our soft padded couches, lift up, and laboriously unwrap heavy, tough wrapping paper in order to receive their full benefits.

Friday evening, God gave us a gift of affliction and conviction – but it is only a gift if we have the courage to unwrap the gift. This gift cost the lives of over 129 people – it was a warning gift which, if we unwrap the gift properly, will change our lives, the lives of our loved ones, and the lives of millions of other people. But if we do not unwrap the gift, or unwrap it in the wrong way, we will never see it as a gift of God, but only as just another massacre in a foreign land where two groups of people fight who we don’t care anything about.

You wonder that I call it a gift? God knows how to take the most evil plots of Satan and use them for good in this world. And as we learn also to do the same, as we learn not to fall in despair and fear from Satan's plots, as we learn to imitate Christ in faith and hope, we also can see and create good out of anything Satan tosses toward us. It is our attitude and willingness to learn that allows one person's evil to be converted into a good gift...a gift of affliction that, properly unwrapped, ultimately foils Satan as we learn lessons for our good.

Friday evening, as we now know, 8 Islamic state assassins, wearing suicide vests and carrying automatic weapons attacked major sites around Paris, France. Some of the assassins appear to be from Syria and Egypt, but others were from Belgium and France, home-grown. They were not soldiers attacking other soldiers – they were radical, intense, armed men attacking and killing as many civilians as possible. Not only did they target civilians, they intentionally shot men and women in wheelchairs.

And one thing we know – if statistics hold true, then of those 129 or so people who were killed Friday evening, only 3 or 4 were believers in Jesus Christ, for modern France – and especially Paris, is no longer the center of Catholic Christianity that it once was, but it is a land filled with people who either do not believe in God, or are simply “spiritual” but not Christian. France is simply 30 years ahead of America in its loss of believers – in 30 years, America will be where France is today unless we do something about it. And so we untie the bow on the gift and the first question comes to us – will we be afflicted by this gift and wake up?

The assassins’ purpose was to generate fear, because fear leads to hate, hate leads to anger, and anger leads to suffering. And the killers believed that this was a good outcome – fear, hate, anger, and suffering. And as these emotion spread, more violence will develop against Moslems, and this will create fear, hate, anger, and suffering which will recruit more Moslems to ISIS. I call people who do this evil, for none of those are good ideas. And the people who do this are doing the work of Satan, the prince of evil.

But God is more powerful than Satan and can always use Satan’s works for good. And so, as I lay awake after midnight Friday night, I began to look at what has been happening in my life around here as a pastor. And I did not like what I saw.

We have let ourselves become focused upon the trivial and the meaningless instead of the important things:

Over the last month, while people have been dying around the world and in this town without knowing Jesus Christ, I have spent my time in meetings discussing whether or not we can live with tiles that are slightly different colors in the kitchen and the fellowship hall. I have been involved in planning events in the church and deciding which event is in which room and will there be enough room? I have heard repeatedly that one of our big problems is that the shrubs stick out too far over the sidewalk, and there have been great questions about what the photo on the cover of our new directory should be. I have spent a fair amount of time trying to get the right power board for the carillon bell system so the bells will play again, and been involved in discussions about the precise starting and stopping times of our Wednesday evening events, and whether or not we should risk damage to the tiles by starting up Wednesday evenings again the night before they are waxed. We have become focused upon the meaningless and the trivial and ignored the important things of life.

Folks, I am ashamed of this. You can tell something about a man or a woman by the things that they spend their time on, by the things that make them upset. Do we let ourselves get upset more by the timing of our bells and what they play – or by people dying without God?

Every hour I spent on these discussions is another hour where people could have been hearing about Christ. Every hour we spent arbitrating these questions is an hour we could have spent speaking to friends about Christ. Every hour we spent with these ultimately trivial questions is an hour where we could each be talking to someone who is lost about the only way to avoid dying the real death, the only way to have eternal life with God, the Way, the Truth, and the Life – Jesus Christ. We have lost our way and I have let us do this.

And so I say it is time for us to turn back to the purpose of this church, the reason it was founded in the first place. This church was not planted here to be a place for social events and baked steak dinners. This church was not planted here to be a place where we spend endless time discussing wallpaper colors and our favorite styles of music. This church was planted here to provide a place for people to learn about God and Christ and the Holy Spirit, to worship that Trinity, and to learn how to lead other people to the saving grace of Jesus Christ!

And so if we are to have a social event, let it glorify God. If we are to have a baked steak dinner, let it lead to discussions of Christ. If we are to discuss wallpaper and music styles, let us put aside our personal preferences and concentrate instead on what will reach out, inspire, and passionately bring to Christ the people who are NOT here today, the people who will die and march into Satan’s land unless we do something!

As I’ve mentioned, in Atlanta we made many Moslem friends. Most of them were wonderful, peace-loving people. But ISIS Moslems are not ordinary Moslems. If we do not do something, I fear that the number of people with no relationship to God will continue to grow around here. And gradually, gradually, we are seeing that people with no faith are more likely to adopt any faith where they are welcomed – including radical Islam. I do not look forward to a day when there is an ISIS group meeting every Friday night in Clarksburg – do you?

For I do not want to hear that one evening there were bombs set off outside Mountaineer Stadium. I do not want to hear that gunmen using AK-47’s attacked Oliverio’s and the FOP and the Parkette. I do not want to hear that three men using automatic weapons and grenades entered a concert at RCB and held hundreds of people hostage and then began shooting them, one by one, starting with those who were in wheelchairs. And the key to stopping this is when all the people – not a quarter, not a half, not most – but all of the people are solid followers of Jesus Christ, who said to love your neighbor as yourself.

And now I’ve unwrapped the gift, the gift that is a blaring alarm clock waking us up, But perhaps you think I’m going a bit too far. Perhaps you think that I’m a bit too focused upon what we each should be doing for our neighbors. Perhaps you think that God really doesn’t care all that much what each of us does, and would never use you – or even pay attention to you. Let’s talk about an ordinary man, born 300 years ago and 3000 miles away, and what God did through him.

John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist movement, was born in the small town of Epworth, England in 1703 in a white plaster walled and thatch-roofed parsonage. God gave John a pair of gifts known as parents. John’s father Samuel was a pastor, and his mother Susanna was the daughter of a pastor. And so, when John was born – the 15th child of 19 – John received another gift as Susanna soon taught John to read and write, including Latin and Greek, and he began to memorize large sections of the Bible because…Mother expected it – and she could be a wonderful instrument of God’s affliction! Young John may not have thought that unwrapping this gift was fun – who wants to study Latin and Greek at age 5?

After John had been reading for a while, there was a fire in the parsonage and five-year-old John was stuck on the 2nd floor. With the stairs on fire and the roof ready to collapse, one congregation member stood on another’s shoulders and lifted John through the second-story window. This great gift from God – explained by John’s mother to him - convinced John that God had something important for him to do in his life.

John entered the great university of Oxford when he was 17, and later became an instructor at the college.

Another gift awaited John. John’s younger brother Charles had also come to Oxford; they began a Christian club with about a half-dozen friends. These men, college boys sent together by God to be gifts to each other, became extraordinarily close, and focused themselves on God. Their club was rather intense – they met every evening from 6 to 9 pm reading scripture in Greek, discussing scripture, and praying together. Every waking hour they would stop for a few minutes and pray. They attended church services every week – at a time when the church suggested attending 3 times a year. They fasted every Wednesday, and on Fridays until 3 pm. They visited prisoners weekly and particularly helped those who were in prison for debts, and they cared for the sick. Not bad for a group of college boys, eh?

In return, the other college boys afflicted them by called them the “Holy Club”. Some said they were so enamored of their methodical practices that they called them “Methodies”. It was a time of affliction for John, ridiculed by his peers, but this special name was a gift from God. Convicted, John Wesley wrote a letter where he proudly took up the name “The Oxford Methodists”.

As time went on, John developed an even more detailed plan, where he wrote down how devoted he was every hour of every day on a scale of 1-9. John was focused upon doing the right things for God. But John felt convicted, for he often did the easy and ordinary actions instead of what God asked.

After about five years with the Oxford Methodists, John and Charles boarded a ship for Savannah, Georgia to become missionaries. But on the way across the Atlantic, God gave John another gift of affliction. A storm came up that broke the mast of the ship. While John and Charles panicked and worried about their impending doom, a group of Moravian missionaries on board calmly prayed and sang hymns. John was convicted as he realized that his Christianity was an outer Christianity – despite all of his hard work to stay holy, the Moravians, who were at peace in the storm, had something John did not have. It deeply affected John. Have you ever seen other Christians have a faith you did not have?

When John arrived in Savannah, he was deeply disappointed that Native Americans were not coming to visit the town in large numbers, and where he had thought his mission would be to the natives, his mission turned out to be to the group of criminals, debtors, and roughnecks that formed the new town of Savannah.

Yet, although the people of Savannah thought Wesley’s ways were those of the big city and the big church, attendance slowly grew at the church and several small groups were formed both in Savannah and further down the coast. Most people think that Wesley was a failure in Georgia – John thought he was a failure in Georgia – but that was only in contrast to the great events of his later life. John and Charles truly started Georgia on the way to becoming a solidly Christian part of the Bible Belt.

But John also fell in love in Savannah. Another gift from God arrived, although John only saw the affliction at the time. The girl in question chose to marry a different man, John denied her communion, and in the resulting church fight he had to flee the city for England.

Upon his arrival in England, John Wesley was 34 years old, single, lonely, depressed, afflicted and beaten. Charles soon joined him and they met a Moravian missionary, who they had several long talks with. The man invited John to a meeting on Aldersgate street. John reluctantly agreed to go. Have you ever been reluctant to go to a bible study? That evening, a man read from a commentary, and suddenly, the words and the Holy Spirit combined to give John another great gift. John wrote about the event later that evening in his journal:

"In the evening I went very unwillingly to a society in Aldersgate Street, where one was reading Luther’s Preface to the Epistle to the Romans. About a quarter before nine, while he was describing the change which God works in the heart through faith in Christ, I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone for salvation, and an assurance was given me that he had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death."

It was an important day in John’s life. He wrote a few weeks later to his mother:

"By a Christian, I mean one who so believes in Christ, as that sin hath no more dominion over him: And in the obvious sense of the word, I was not a Christian till May the 24th last past. For till then sin had dominion over me, although I fought with it continually; but surely, then, from that time to this it hath not; — such is the free grace of God in Christ.”

It was at Aldersgate that John Wesley finally understood Jesus Christ and the great gift of Christ. It was from this point onward that his sermons changed, his effectiveness in ministry grew ten-fold, and his life became filled with joy. Will today at Quiet Dell be the day everything changes for you?

You see, up until this point, everything that John Wesley did was because he was filled with a dreadful fear of God – and the prospect of hell and damnation. John Wesley was filled with a sense of duty – he read the Bible repeatedly, had memorized most of it, he was consumed with imitating Jesus Christ and the saints. Anyone who met Wesley found him to be outwardly humble, considerate, giving, loving, always ready to give you money if you needed it, a good man, most would say a most holy and kind man.

But there was something missing. And John had known it, but he didn’t know what was missing. Repeatedly John had been convicted that there was something missing in his relationship with God. And this meant he was constantly afflicted while he was trying to follow God’s will at first in traditional ways – going to church, praying, reading the Bible – and then in less traditional ways – helping the poor, giving charity, and fasting.

To John Wesley before Aldersgate, God was a distant, powerful king, a ruler who might just listen to your prayers if you were careful and persistent in those prayers. Perhaps this is the way you look at God. Wesley understood that God ruled the world, and Wesley understood the importance of following the ways of Christ. John Wesley understood that Jesus Christ was divine, God walking upon this earth. John had all this knowledge of God – perhaps you do too. But John Wesley had never understood the humanity of Jesus Christ. Do you?

John Wesley had never felt beloved of God, for John Wesley had always worked hard and been successful and done many things, and that was what was important in the world, that you work hard and that you be successful and never, never ask another for help if you could possibly do it yourself. He was like many of us, wasn’t he?

And then, that night in Aldersgate, he heard that God does not ask that you work at all for God’s love. John heard that before he was born, before you were born, God loved you so much that God decided to die for you and remove all memory of your sins – as soon as you accepted that gift of forgiveness.

It was like a white-painted plaster living room wall in the house where you grew up, where you had written terrible things with indelible ink. And then you regretted them and worked and worked to wipe off and erase those terrible marks before your father came home from work, for every mark and every word could not have been written by anyone except you, for you HAD wrote them, they were there on that nice white-painted sin wall in your handwriting, and the ink had soaked deep into the plaster. Terrible, ugly things, and you madly worked to erase everything before the key turned in the door and doom walked into your life.

But what you didn’t realize was that the minute you asked for help from your elder brother, and ran for cover under your bed, hiding from your sure, certain punishment, the minute you told your elder brother “I did it, can you PLEASE help me?” – your elder brother Jesus took out a wonderful spray can of grace and where ever that spray hit on that wall the entire wall turned a beautiful clean white once again, a sparkling, wonderfully clean white that was so slick nothing could ever stick to it again.

And what you really didn’t realize was that your Father had talked with your elder brother days earlier, that your Father had given Jesus the spray can, and that the two of them together had planned that as soon as you asked for help, Jesus and Father would wipe all those ugly stains off the wall. But they needed you to admit that you needed help, for only then could they actually help you in your need.

That is the great gift of conviction that John Wesley received at Aldersgate Street that night, when he actually came to realize that the only thing keeping him from being right with God the Father was gone when he realized that Jesus had made his personal wall clean for ever.

As the writer of Hebrew wrote:

19 Therefore, brothers and sisters, since we have confidence to enter the Most Holy Place by the blood of Jesus, 20 by a new and living way opened for us through the curtain, that is, his body, 21 and since we have a great priest over the house of God, 22 let us draw near to God with a sincere heart and with the full assurance that faith brings, having our hearts sprinkled to cleanse us from a guilty conscience and having our bodies washed with pure water. 23 Let us hold unswervingly to the hope we profess, for he who promised is faithful.
But there is a bit more.

Most of us know that John Wesley went forth from that night in Aldersgate to preach tremendous sermons to crowds of hundreds and thousands of people in cemetaries, in open fields, by the mine shafts, in the city streets – almost anywhere except in big churches, because the big churches would not invite these poor, struggling, dirty people to their social events and dinners and services.

And by their hundreds and thousands ordinary people came to salvation, to understand that their personal walls were now cleaned by Jesus Christ, that Christianity was not about big churches and fancy robes and organs and choirs and social events and dinners and even praise bands, but it was about the peace that people had in their own hearts when they met God and their hearts were “strangely warmed” by God’s love and assurance.

And many of those people chose to help one another by joining small groups of people just like themselves whom they could trust to tell them when they were putting graffiti on their sin walls again like I sometimes do here, people they could trust to afflict them in a positive way so that the Holy Spirit could convict them, people they could trust to help each other to love other people and do good deeds, and people they could trust to encourage them as the Day of Judgment approached – and their day of death approached. For they followed what the writer of the Book of Hebrews had written:

24 And let us consider how we may spur one another on toward love and good deeds, 25 not giving up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but encouraging one another—and all the more as you see the Day approaching.

Who will you spur on toward love and good deeds?

Some of those men who had worked in the mines and on the farms and in the early factories began to lead small groups. In fact, the leader of a group was often called the steward. And some were so convicted that they began to study hard and as the movement grew to several thousand people, then ten thousand, then twenty thousand people, and in America grew to more than a hundred thousand, many of those small group leaders began to preach and some of those men – and women, for there were also women involved – some of those illiterate men learned how to read in the small group meetings and eventually some of them led major revivals and churches of their own as God gave them gifts, just as God had given John Wesley gifts, and before John Wesley, God had given the writer of the Book of Hebrews gifts.

For you see, God is still in the business of giving people gifts.

In 1984, I gave my first sales presentation. It flopped. I’m not exaggerating when I say that over half of the audience dozed off. We did not get the contract. But that was a gift, for I did not resist when my boss suggested I take a sales training course. I taught that course five years later as Marketing and Sales Manager of another company, and then in still another company my planning and training was able to quadruple sales in three years.

But I grew arrogant. I thought I could do all sorts of things, whatever I wanted to do. And so God gave me a gift.

In 1996, my right hand received third degree burns when I made a wiring mistake. My upper arm had first degree burns, my hair on my head was crispy, a tiny piece of molten metal hit the center of one of my eyeglasses, there were blisters on my forearm and wrist and my hand looked like elephant hide. Talk about affliction! You heard and seen how a serious burn pulls the skin together and hurts your ability to move. God gave me a gift – shall I play the piano for you?

Yes, God gives us wonderful gifts.

And so I now turn to you.

What is your life about? Are you satisfied with your life? Are you living your dream? Have you decided that you are simply going to continue to work for a human employer, going about the motions until you retire, and then play with the grandchildren when you can and keep the house fixed up when the grandkids aren’t around? Are you satisfied? Or is God giving you the gifts of affliction and conviction, jabbing you from time to time with that sharp stick when you’d love to just sit on your comfortable couch? Would you like to see what God can do with your life if you gave God a chance?

What is the purpose of life, anyway? What is the purpose of YOUR life?

I suspect you haven’t found the answer. I haven’t found the full purpose of my life, yet, because God has only shown me a little bit of it, but I do know this: When you decide to work for God’s purposes, God gives you gifts – more and more every day. Those gifts aren’t always pleasant, but they are always good if we unwrap them properly.

Most of us grew up with people telling you – don’t try for too much, you’ll be disappointed, look at how bad it is for the wealthy, the famous, the successful. We were told that God favors those who try to live a quiet life. And this is largely true. But there is one thing most of our parents forgot to tell us – God wants people who will follow His Son boldly. God wants to take average people and use them to do great things – that way God gets the credit.

Most of the good Christian football players realize this – how come they are the only Christians that point their finger to the sky when great things happen? How come the football players talk more about God than we do? Why don’t we believe that God can do great things – different things, but great things – through us. Why do we believe that great things only happen in big city churches? Do we need to wait for Pittsburgh and Charleston to get a revival before we do?

But our revival has already started. Most charges have 1 or 2 lay servants. Our charge is blessed with 11 people who have stepped forward and become lay servants.

In most churches, people are afraid to talk to someone about God. In the last month, how many of you have talked about God to someone outside the church? A quarter of you? Look at how many of you have! That is how we change the world, people! It is up to us, the Christians of the world, to take the gifts God has given us and go to change the world. It is up to each of us. Do you believe God can change things working through us? Of course God can!

Just this past month in this town, after great prayers were said for him, I have seen a man come back from a stopped heart three times. And each time I see him, he is better than he was before. I think it is because God has a great purpose for Fred – It may be in the people Fred talks to – or it may be in the people you tell Fred’s story to. God is working here in this church today.

Have you recognized just how great is the basic gift of the clean, white wall that your Father and Jesus Christ have given you? What are you going to do with that gift?

What are you going to do with your Father’s gift of love and cleanliness? How many more massacres will it take before you understand that helping people come into a close relationship with Jesus Christ is a matter of eternal life and death and is the ONLY thing that matters?

The Final Victory - Thoughts on the Poor Widow's Mites

1 Kings 17:8-16; Psalm 146; Hebrews 9:24-28; Mark 12:38-44

This is the last of 8 sermons on a series Entitled “God Solves our Problems”.

We’ve heard how the promise of eternal life changes our perspective on problems, allowing us to see problems with an eternal, godly perspective instead of an urgent, human perspective. And we saw how, with our permission, God puts us into a training program to help us learn to live godly, holy lives. Then we saw how God’s model of the servant leader drives us to help other people rather than look upon others as our servants. We saw how understanding our relationship to God keeps us from becoming arrogant, and how prayer keeps us humble. We talked about how God requires and helps us keep our integrity, and we found out that following Jesus is far more important than following rules. We saw how asking to see Jesus and approaching Him heals us. Last week, we talked about how putting God first means that we will also pay special attention to all those images of God – the people around us.

And today, we will talk about the rest of our problems.

Today, I want to talk about a great woman of faith from ancient times, perhaps the greatest woman of faith mentioned in ancient literature. Many of the details of her life are missing – and so I hope you’ll bear with me as I use my imagination and knowledge of the time to fill in some of the blanks.

She grew up in the hill country of Israel. Daughter of a poor farmer, she began working with her mother when she was four-years-old. In a time before washers and dryers and before automatic ovens and dishwashers, in a time before ice boxes, let alone freezers and refrigerators, preparing food and keeping a home and bodies clean enough for survival was a full time job. Especially since there was no birth control except abstinence. Women married by age 15 and began having children every two or three years – as soon as they weaned one child, they quickly became pregnant again.

The work was hard. There were no grocery stories – and even if there was, there was no money to buy with. If you wanted to eat, you grew it or raised it. Your farm was your world, a time when the only vacations were the great festivals where everyone was commanded to go to Jerusalem – Passover, the Festival of First Fruits, the Festival of Booths and the Day of Atonement, and the new Festival of Hannakah. Four times a year, for a week or so, the family left the farm, took food for the journey, and livestock or grain for sacrifices, and walked the 50 miles to Jerusalem, where they spent the night in a tent outside of town. And while she was there, she would see the wonderful Temple where the God of the Universe was worshipped.

The little girl was carried by her father for several years, but by the time she was seven or eight years old she walked like the rest of the older children. And she carried her little brother with her when she was eleven.

One day, when she was fourteen, she noticed an older boy staring at her along the road home. The next day, her mother and father told her that she had been promised to Itzack, the boy, to be his wife. They were married a year later.

She began having children, but they were all girls. Itzack had a small farm, and they worked hard, and saved up to buy a cow. Unfortunately, when our heroine was 28, Itzack was kicked in the head by the cow and never woke again. She was alone on the farm, with four girls, the oldest of which was now 12 years old. She was a widow. The tremendous burden of being responsible for her family weighed heavily on her every day and she, who had always stood so tall, began to bend over with the responsibility.

The girls and she struggled on the farm for another two years, and then she married off her oldest daughter. The son of one of the leading scribes in the town – a great man, a religious man whom everyone respected because he copied the sacred scrolls for a living and thus was very wealthy – his son married her daughter. It was such a joy, the scribe was known for his fabulous public prayers, his ability to pray on for twenty minutes on any subject. He sat in the front row of the synagogue and always had wonderful robes, perfectly made just as scripture said. This was her daughter's new father-in-law.

But the choice she had to make was that she had to give the scribe the house and half the land as a dowry. She felt that the man had devoured her farm, but that was the price to be paid to ensure that her daughter would have a decent life.

She and her other daughters continued to work the half-size farm, living in the barn with the animals. The hard work destroyed her back, the lack of food weakened the family, and the two youngest daughters died of sickness, probably because they never had enough food to eat. It was just her and her remaining daughter left, and it was time for the Passover. At age 31, she looked like she was 80.

This year, leaving behind her daughter to handle the animals, she walked to Jerusalem alone with a single lamb and some grain. She knew she had to make a sacrifice because surely she had sinned, and that was why her life was so terrible. And so she walked in worn-out sandals, fighting the lamb all the way to Jerusalem, 50 miles over rough roads which went up and down and up and down over the hills and the mountains as she approached Jerusalem.

There was a crowd that day – there was always a crowd in Jerusalem when the Passover festival was going on. But she had very little money, so she went directly to the Temple, and asked for her lamb to be inspected for sacrifice. There was a dark spot on the tip of his tail, and so the Temple priest would not pass the lamb, and pointed her to his cousin who had “blemish-free” lambs for sale a block away.

When she found his cousin, the man offered her a deal. He would take her lamb in trade for a blemish-free lamb plus two silver denarius coins - each worth an entire day's pay - and most of her stash of grain. She made the deal, even though it left her with only two lepta, thin copper coins that totaled enough money to buy about a quarter of a loaf of bread.

She went back to the Temple, had the lamb pass inspection, and then proceeded to the line for sacrifice. While she waited for a quarter of the day in line, she slowly ate the remaining dried wheat she had with her – about a half cup. After a couple of hours, she noticed a man well-behind her in line with her lamb - apparently a different priest had passed her lamb after he was sold to another man.

Finally, her sacrifice was accepted and made. But something nagged at her as she walked away from the sacrifice and passed two Roman soldiers. She felt that she was withholding from God something. She felt that she still had to give something back to God, for God had kept her alive, God had given her the two silver denarius coins, God had given her grain to eat, God had given her a daughter at home. This was important – and she wanted God’s presence to remain in her land, not wanting her land to be overwhelmed by the pagan Romans, but she wanted the God of the Temple to remain here in great glory.

And so she walked up to the Temple Treasury box past a group of Galileans who were sitting on the steps watching people. Ahead of her, a well-dressed man had two servants pour a hundred pounds of gold and silver coins into the treasury box. Another man put a beautiful golden filigree necklace in the box, it had a wonderful design of pomegranates and doves, she had never seen something so beautiful. And then it was her turn.

She took out her two lepta, worth together enough to buy a quarter of a loaf of bread. It was all she had. Should she give them? Perhaps she could give just one. Then, closing her eyes and praying for God to take care of her on the way home, she dropped them both into the box and ran down the steps toward the street, the city gate, and the 50 mile walk home to her daughter and the farm that barely kept them alive. But she felt tremendous joy because she no longer was responsible for her survival – God was now responsible.

As she ran by, the leader of the Galileans smiled to her and said to them, “I assure you: This poor widow has put in more than all those giving to the temple treasury. For they all gave out of their surplus, but she out of her poverty has put in everything she possessed—all she had to live on.”

…

As we look back through time at the poor widow, there are certain lessons we should learn. First of all, the plain meaning of Jesus’ words is that rich, so-called important people who are known for their obvious devotion to God are not that important to Jesus. We’ve all heard the stories of the benefactor of a church who doesn’t give to the church because of their love of God or even their love of the church, but because of their love of attention. And I’ve seen churches that were terribly crippled because they had one very wealthy person who provided all the funds for the church – and thus the rest of the church never saw the need and thus never had the desire – nor the faith - to give to the church.

When we give to the church, we show faith. When we give to the church, we show that we have a firm belief that there is something important happening here, that there is something greater than ourselves and our personal agenda at work. But we need to remember that there are several reasons for giving, reasons that may change as a person’s commitment to Christ and the church deepens. Just about everyone goes through each of these reasons as they grow more mature in their walk with Christ.

There are those who give because they feel that it is a just and proper payment for services received. To these people, the church is a business similar to a movie theatre or a restaurant, and thus people give in relation to the value they receive. And so we have many people who put money in the plate when they are here, and if they miss a Sunday, the church never sees those funds, for these people did not hear the sermon, did not listen the music, and did not hear the Word of God, and so they did not contribute. These people can truly be said to attend church.

There are other people who understand that giving is a duty of the people of God. They often look back at the Old Testament law and give a tenth of their income to the church, for they were taught and they feel that this is their duty. And so this is a regular budgeted item, and when they miss a Sunday, we see twice the donation the next Sunday as they “catch up” for what they missed giving. We count on their checks every week or every month. These people can be said to be members of the church, paying dues and belonging to an organization that is composed of people who support the church, who care about each other, and who work together.

And then there are those people who recognize that there is something about the church that is deeply transforming the world around us, that there is indeed an important mission that needs money to be accomplished, and they look at their ability to earn money as their ability to earn money for God’s mission. These rare people often look at how they are living and they truly have decided that God’s Great Commission is something they want to support or even that it is what their lives are about, and one of the ways they have decided to handle the Great Commission is through the gifts of money. And so they look at their budgets and they look at how they can cut back on their personal expenses and then they give those saved funds to God so that God’s purposes might be fulfilled.

These are the people who care that over a third of Americans no longer are certain that God exists. These are the people who are concerned that over a quarter of our country no longer even claims to be Christian. These are the people who know that God’s love is critical for the salvation of the world – and their children, grandchildren, and neighbor’s children. And so they give in every way they can – through money, through service, through prayers, through the use of their special talents, and through their witness to others. And they give quietly, not bragging, not grabbing attention, but they do what they can and they fall asleep many nights exhausted from their service and their giving, but they have confidence in what God can do. These are the people who are the church.

Consider how you give and what your giving pattern is. Do you budget your giving, or do you give what is left over, giving as the wealthy men did at the Temple, only from your surplus? I have to admit that this is one of my weaknesses, giving from surplus instead of from faith. When I am at my best, I give from faith – When I am weak – I worry. And so the question becomes: Do you trust in the God you serve to take care of you?

(Some people give even after they go to be with the Lord. If you want to give to the church through your estate or life insurance, please talk with your pastor first, because these sorts of gifts need to be constructed carefully or they may not accomplish the purposes you desire.)

Consider what you can give for the next year. If you’ve given $5 a week, perhaps you can now give $10. If you’ve given $50 a week, perhaps you can now give $60. If you’ve given nothing, perhaps you can now give something. But, as I’ve said before, only you know your financial situation. It does no one any good for your donations to the church to drive you into debt, and we’d rather have you sitting on these pews for a year without giving than leave because you can’t give.

Remember – it isn’t how much you give. It is the fact that you trust God and God’s representatives to use what you give back to God to accomplish great and important things – such as baptizing people who would have died in their sin if it wasn’t for the generosity of you and the people sitting around you. Your donations to the Food Pantry and 30-Hour Famine have meant literally thousands of meals provided for people, some of whom were desperate and some of whom were just having a bad month…or two…or three.

And there is something else.

John Wesley had several friends who were also involved as much as he was in the great revival of the church that happened in the mid-1700’s in both England and America. Some of these men were Methodists, and some were what we would today call Baptists. Both groups of preachers went out to the people, preaching in fields and towns outside of the churches. And both groups of preachers saw tremendous numbers of people come to the saving love of Christ. But there was a significant difference between how Wesley’s Methodists saw the revival and how the Baptists saw the revival.

Most of the Baptists saw salvation as a once-in-a-lifetime event. You were saved, and then perhaps you helped save others.

But Wesley and the Methodists saw that there is more to the Christian life than this. Not only must you connect again with God, learn about Christ, and eventually teach others about Christ, there is a path of holiness we must learn to follow. Our acceptance of Christ as our lord saves us from God’s wrath, but we still must be saved from the natural consequences of our own actions.

And so each Christian must learn to imitate Christ more and more fully, by practice, by learning to listen closer and closer to the Holy Spirit, and by leaning more and more upon God to provide our needs, and conforming our wants and desires more and more to the desires of God. Our salvation from ourselves is a slow progress upon a path where we hopefully are being more and more saved daily.

In short, we need to learn to rely more upon God and upon Christ’s teachings, and less upon ourselves and the teachings of the world if we truly want to become holy – set apart with Christ. We are to be married to the Holy Trinity - God and Christ and Holy Spirit - the same way that a wonderfully married couple grows to become more and more alike in attitude and opinion as they grow older, less and less influenced by what others think of them and more and more concerned with what their spouse thinks of them. This is how our relationship with God is supposed to become.

And this applies to the giving of time, of talents, of witness, and yes, of treasure. Giving, you see, means we take time and treasure away from earning a living and saving money. And so do you depend upon the world – or do you depend upon God? You see, we must decide whether or not we depend upon our jobs and our savings for our security – or upon God. Shall we work? Of course. But consider Who provides for us. Is it our employer or is it God? The day we learn to truly trust God for everything – our love, our hope, our security, our day-to-day living - is the day of our final victory over the world.

...

The widow’s walk home from Jerusalem was dreadful, as you might expect, but the kind smile of that Galilean and the kind words he had said kept her going. She stopped briefly at the well beside an inn in Bethany, filled her waterskin, talked a bit to the sisters that ran the inn, and then she walked fifty miles over the next three days with nothing to eat, and finally collapsed when she got home late that night. Her daughter found her the next morning, almost dead.

She fed her some boiled wheat with a little bit of lamb. A fever racked her body, and she could not get out of bed for two weeks. But her daughter took care of her, and always, the wonderful smile of that Galilean kept coming back to her.

And then there was a knock at the door. It was a servant from her elder daughter’s house. He insisted that she come along with him, and since she could not walk, he put her on his donkey and took her the two miles to her daughter’s home.

When she got there, her daughter met her at the door. She had been crying. “Mother, Itzack’s father, the scribe, has died.”

“How did he die?” she asked, too stunned to console her daughter.

“He was sitting on the back of his donkey, where he had been praying in front of a crowd for 45 minutes, going on and on about what a humble and poor man he was when the donkey began to walk, got its leg caught in his long robe – the one with the gold and silver thread, and it jerked him off the donkey. Then, the donkey fell on top of him, and he died of suffocation, they said.”

“Suffocation? The donkey must have been heavy.”

“No mother, when he fell, the saddle bag fell on top of him, a bunch of coins fell onto his face, and he died with three gold coins stuck in his throat.” Mother and daughter looked at each other for a minute – and then they began to giggle.

“Itzack and I wanted to tell you – we’ve decided to have you and my sister move in with us. You’ll never have to work again – unless you want to.”

And the kind smile of the Galilean came back to the woman again.

“I assure you: This poor widow has put in more than all those giving to the temple treasury. 44 For they all gave out of their surplus, but she out of her poverty has put in everything she possessed—all she had to live on.”

With those two copper coins she had put her entire faith in God into the Treasury box – and once again, God had come through for her. Will you put your entire faith in God?

Two Relationships

Deuteronomy 6:1-9; Psalm 119:1-8; Hebrews 9:11-14; Mark 12:28-34

This is the seventh of 8 sermons on a series Entitled “God Solves our Problems”.

We’ve heard how the promise of eternal life changes our perspective on problems, allowing us to see problems with an eternal, godly perspective instead of an urgent, human perspective. And we saw how, with our permission, God puts us into a training program to help us learn to live godly, holy lives. Then we saw how God’s model of the servant leader drives us to help other people rather than look upon others as our servants. We saw how understanding our relationship to God keeps us from becoming arrogant, and how prayer keeps us humble. We talked about how God requires and helps us keep our integrity, and we found out that following Jesus is far more important than following rules. And last week we saw how asking to see Jesus and approaching Him heals us. And today, we talk about relationships.

Jesus and His disciples had arrived in Jerusalem for the Holy Week that led up to the great Passover Feast. Jesus and his students had entered the town to a great celebration. He went to the temple for a while and then they went back outside the town a couple of miles to stay at Bethany.

The next day was an eventful day. Jesus and his followers went to the Temple, and Jesus began teaching. Various people kept coming up to Jesus and challenging Him on various points. A group of priests and teachers asked him who had given Him authority to teach. He spoke to them of a leased vineyard where the workers continually kill the servants who come to gather the rent for the owner, and those same workers eventually kill the son of the owner.

A group of Pharisees and men from King Herod tried to trap Him with His words, asking Him whether or not it was right to pay taxes to the Romans. He asked them for a coin, asked them whose image was on it and when told it was Caesar’s image, he told them to give back to Caesar what was Caesar’s and God what was God’s.

After this, a group of Sadducees, who didn’t believe in a resurrection, asked him a trick question about how would be the husband in the resurrection of a woman who had been married seven times. He told them that God had said to Moses: ‘I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob’, focusing upon the small detail of the present tense of the words “I AM” and concluding that Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob must have been living at the time – resurrected by God.

And then, a teacher, a rabbi, overhead them and asked Him what was the greatest commandment? You see, according to the ancient Jewish rabbis, there are far more than Ten commandments in the Old Testament – there are 613 commandments – 365 Thou Shall NOT commandments, corresponding to the number of days in the year, and 248 Thou Shall commandments, corresponding to the number of bones and organs in the human body. “Which of all these commandments is the greatest, “the man asked Jesus.

29 “The most important one,” answered Jesus, “is this: ‘Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. 30 Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’

Jesus recited the SHEMA’, the ancient formula that dated back to Moses and has been found on pottery and trinkets in Israel as old as 800 BC. “Hear, O Israel: Yahweh is God, Yahweh is one”. “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one.”

And because Yahweh is God, you should love Yahweh with all your emotion (your heart), with all your life force (your soul), with all your reasoning (your mind), and with all your physical body (your strength). Jesus tells us our number one focus in our entire life, our greatest love, the focus of our energy, our every thought and our physical work should be devoted toward loving God.

How seriously do you take this?

When you were dating your future spouse, how focused were you upon them? Did you think of them in the morning, spend your day dreaming of them, re-arrange your life for them, always try to clear your schedule for them? Did you plan and think and work out ways that you could be together with her or him?

And do you do half that much toward God, who is to be number one in your life?

Jesus told us to give everything to God, for one day, you see, you will have nothing except God…

But because every person on earth is a three-dimensional image of God, created in the likeness of the Creator by the Creator, we also have a second commandment. As Jesus said, “31 The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no commandment greater than these.”

You are an infinitely valuable image of God and therefore are worthy of the love you give to God. And your neighbor is also an image of God, if you will, he or she is a photograph of God taken from a different angle with different lighting, yet is another infinitely valuable image of God. We are to be completely protecting and supporting and lifting up all the people we know and meet and run into. We are to look sideways at everyone as if we are looking in the mirror when we see someone else.

But instead, we look downward upon some people, and upward toward others. But our head neck was designed to turn most easily sideways and to look forward. Looking up is for avoiding predators and looking down is for picking up food. And so we treat some people as predators, out to get us, and we fear them. And we treat other people as prey, to be consumed by us as we try to get what we want from life. And so we damage ourselves, cringing when we think everyone is a predator, and developing a wolf’s posture when we think everyone is food for our desires.

But this is wrong. We are to treat all people – as ourselves. And the only Persons we are to look up to are the three Persons of the Holy Trinity – God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit.

And how do we treat others as ourselves? Just what CAN we do?

Perhaps when you buy Christmas presents this year, you’ll put aside an equal amount of money for Open Heart Ministries, the Harrison County Ministry that helps people with rent and utility payments. Yes, we need to help those in need in our community.

But treating others as ourselves goes a bit farther, and involves people closer to us, such as our family members, our church friends, our friends.

To treat others as ourselves, perhaps we’ll not complain about something that someone didn’t do for us, recognizing that complaints are often an attempt to force another person to do something we don’t want to do ourselves. For example, if you think we need more flowers planted around our church, perhaps you might plant those flowers yourself. Particularly in the church and our families, we need to remember that WE are the church. We are the family.

If something needs done, it is up to us to do it or spend money hiring people to do those few things we don’t have the skill set for. We get so much in the habit of training our children to do things – which is appropriate - that we go further and inappropriately complain about our husband or wife who doesn’t do something such as loading the dishwasher, or we complain about the choices made in the church by the people who HAVE stepped up and are trying their best to do things for us. So often, we dehumanize these people and say, “The church ought to do things better, or SOMEONE needs to do A, B, or C”. How about saying “I think such and such needs done and I’d like to do it for everyone else!”

To love others as yourself perhaps you’ll look to another’s comfort before your own. I recently heard of a church that discovered a homeless man in a wheelchair outside their church, a church which is simply not handicap accessible. When it was suggested that the small congregation might move their worship service outside to be with him, because the temperature was in the sixties, members of the congregation declared – “It’s too cold to stay outside”. Yet they left the homeless man outside. Where was the love for neighbor?

To love others as yourself, perhaps you’ll change your perspective on other people, trying repeatedly to understand why someone might do something differently, respecting their decisions, assisting them when they make poor decisions instead of condemning them for their decisions, lifting them up in prayer and lifting them up with tangible help. Sometimes, the very best thing you can do for someone else is to mow their lawn, rake their leaves, or wash their dishes. Remember the time that you needed your lawn mowed - and someone did it for you. Remember the time when your house was a mess - and someone walked in and washed your dishes for you.

Sometimes, what people need is simple – give them a $100 in cash. Sometimes, they need you to take their children to the movies so they can have some time alone. You don’t give them advice – you simply do what would help you most if you were in their shoes. And yes, sometimes the best answer is to tell them how God helped you through a similar situation when you were struggling.

And if we do this, we will one day find ourselves standing alone before God, without anyone or anything else. But that will be just fine with us, for through years of practice and learning to understand other people and our God, we will be standing in front of the One whom we love the most.

And then, suddenly, we will be standing there with all those other images of God that we have learned to love – those reflections of God’s glory that we once knew as other people in this life. And we will be a bright, shiny polished mirror, reflecting God’s glory back to each other, as we stand together in the eternal kingdom of God.

And so there are two relationships that we must uphold. Our vertical relationship with God – and our horizontal relationships with each other – not just in our families, not just the people in this room, but our relationships with all people. And that begins with an intense focus upon what God says to us, learning all that Jesus taught about the Father and the Holy Spirit, imitating Jesus in every action, working to become a saintly person every day.

I’ve recently been studying St Francis of Assisi. You may remember that St Francis is associated with animals, but he also founded the Franciscan order of friars, and is the man whom the current pope took his name from. Francis revolutionized Christianity in the 13th Century, because he did something no one had done in a thousand years. Perhaps the most distinguishing thing about Francis was that he actually took Jesus at His word in His commands. For example, when Jesus said, “Give all that you have to the poor and follow me,” Francis, who was the son of a wealthy man, gave away everything he had, even stripping naked in front of his father and the local bishop, and never owned anything again. The bishop quickly gave him a robe, but to Francis, this was just a loan. He forbade his followers to even touch money. And when Paul said in Colossians 1 that “15 The Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation.” Francis listened and therefore understood that everything and everyone - the Sun, the Moon, the animals, a rock – are all brothers and sisters of Francis, and thus worthy of being treated like family. All this flows from listening intensely to what Holy Scripture has told us – and loving God and other people.

32 “Well said, teacher,” the man replied to Jesus. “You are right in saying that God is one and there is no other but him. 33 To love him with all your heart, with all your understanding and with all your strength, and to love your neighbor as yourself is more important than all burnt offerings and sacrifices.”

34 When Jesus saw that he had answered wisely, he said to him, “You are not far from the kingdom of God.” And from then on no one dared ask him any more questions.
Today is All-Saints Day. Today, we will honor those images of God who have gone on before us to stand before the throne, reflecting the glory of God back and forth to each other.

Our reading from the letter to the Hebrews today reminds us that the high priests of Israel made sacrifices of the blood of goats and calves, but Jesus, being the Son of God, part of God, and thus divine Himself, had something much more valuable than all the goats and calves in the world. He had the infinitely valuable blood which flowed through His body. And thus, when He sacrificed Himself, His precious body and blood upon the cross, His sacrifice was the only thing which could possibly be valuable enough to pay for every person’s sins, once and for all. And therefore, it is through the Blood of Christ that Christian believers may enter the heavenly throne room where God the Father sits. The Blood of Christ is the password that gets us into Heaven. It is the precious Blood of Christ that allows us to one day meet God face-to-face in joy and not despair.

Let us pray,

Lord, we remember these your servants who have gone to be with You. Grant them eternal peace and rest from their labors. Receive them into that Holy City, the New Jerusalem, where they can eat from the Tree of Life and live with You eternally. Grant us the faith that we may declare Your wonderful glory to all people everywhere, and that we may love all people as ourselves and see You in person one day. Amen

St Francis was also a grand poet, the first significant poet who wrote in the Italian language. Here is one of his short poems.

“What Wonderful Majesty! "

What Wonderful Majesty…

What stupendous condescension!
O sublime humility!
That the Lord of the whole universe,
God and the Son of God,
should humble Himself like this
under the form of a little bread,
for our salvation”

“…In this world I cannot see
the Most High Son of God
with my own eyes, except
for His Most Holy Body and Blood.”
- St Francis of Assisi (http://www.azquotes.com/quote/566025)

Shall we now share together the Body and Blood of Christ in Holy Communion. As Francis did – look upon these elements and know that Jesus is here with us, encouraging us, lifting us up, waiting for us each month to use this spiritual food to replace our natural weak body with a spiritually strong body that will have eternal life.

Let us purify ourselves as Christ is pure, leaving behind all sin by asking forgiveness from our Holy Father.