Why Jesus Had to Die

Jeremiah 31:31-34; Psalm 51:1-12; Hebrews 5:5-10; John 12:20-33

As most of you know, I am a bit different. My family will whole-heartedly agree with that statement.

We have been known to do odd things for entertainment. Once, while living in Atlanta, we drove to Birmingham, AL for a hamburger. We have been known to drive to Cool Springs Park on Route 50 just to see if the cow is still on the roof. And last winter, we made the decision to go tubing with the youth group five minutes before we left. I know it doesn’t make sense, but that’s who we are. We don’t often make sense. But we have fun and learn a lot.

And so, when I look at scripture, I often look for the odd parts of the scripture – the parts that don’t make sense if you take just a moment. Like, for example, the transition in our Gospel reading today.

The time of the reading is early in the last week before the Crucifixion. Jesus has entered into town to a joyful celebration and begins to head to the Temple. The town is filled with Jews who are in town for the week-long Passover festival, one of the most important holidays of the Jewish calendar.

Suddenly, some Greeks who were in town to worship start talking to Phillip. Now, we have to understand that this was highly unusual. There weren’t many Greeks who worshipped at the Jewish temple – Greeks were well known to have their own gods and goddesses. It would be like one of you stopping at the 7/11 on the way to church, and a busload of Chinese tourists asking you if they can come to your church and worship with you – and it turns out that they are all Christians! How unusual would that be here in central West Virginia?

Well, Phillip is a good Greek name, so Phillip probably understood Greek, and so he brings the tourists to Andrew, and the two of them decide together to bring these Greeks to Jesus. So far, so good. But then Jesus does one of those things which is completely in character, but is very odd for anyone else.

You know, most people would meet with the Greeks and you’d expect to see some back and forth between Jesus and the Greeks. But that doesn’t happen in this case. Instead, Jesus suddenly goes into a riff about His upcoming death!

23 Jesus replied, “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified. 24 Very truly I tell you, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds. 25 Anyone who loves their life will lose it, while anyone who hates their life in this world will keep it for eternal life. 26 Whoever serves me must follow me; and where I am, my servant also will be. My Father will honor the one who serves me.

27 “Now my soul is troubled, and what shall I say? ‘Father, save me from this hour’? No, it was for this very reason I came to this hour. 28 Father, glorify your name!”

Then a voice came from heaven, “I have glorified it, and will glorify it again.”29 The crowd that was there and heard it said it had thundered; others said an angel had spoken to him.

30 Jesus said, “This voice was for your benefit, not mine. 31 Now is the time for judgment on this world; now the prince of this world will be driven out.32 And I, when I am lifted up[g] from the earth, will draw all people to myself.”33 He said this to show the kind of death he was going to die.
But why did Jesus have to die?

If you think about it, if Jesus chose to remain, He could still be sitting in Jerusalem, ruling the world with a division of 50,000 angels as well as His divine powers. Why did Jesus have to die and go through the whole death and Resurrection thing?

Jesus’ words here help us to understand why He didn’t take the easy way out and blast His opponents, setting Himself up as undisputed ruler of the world in that day and time.

24 Very truly I tell you, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds.

The first point is that the mere presence of Jesus alive was now a barrier to the spreading of His Words. Let me explain what I mean.

When Saundra and I attended Cornerstone Bible Church in Lilburn, GA, the senior teaching pastor was Dr Doug McIntosh. Doug was – and is – a great teacher. Doug’s sermons have depth and wisdom. They are the sort of sermons that you can listen to week-after-week and always learn something new and transformative in your life. You grew in Christ and wanted to serve the Lord. And so the church prospered, and many missionaries and ministers came from that church. But some people never left the church. They even drove an hour to come back to the church after they moved because of Dr Doug.

Now, if a mere man can be so attractive and addictive in his teaching – I’d like you to imagine walking with Jesus Christ. If Jesus had not left, his disciples would be clustered around Him today, hanging on His every word. There would not be Christian communities in every part of the world. Instead, there would be just one Christian community – within earshot of Jesus Himself.

You see, when Jesus died, just like a kernel of wheat planted, there grew up a plant with many seeds known as disciples. Then many of those disciples also planted communities where they traveled and new groups of disciples sprung up. Christianity spread faster than dandelions across the globe. But it would not have spread if Jesus had not died.

Jesus said: 25 Anyone who loves their life will lose it, while anyone who hates their life in this world will keep it for eternal life.

Was He talking to us or to Himself? It doesn’t matter, for He also said, “26 Whoever serves me must follow me; and where I am, my servant also will be. My Father will honor the one who serves me.”

If we fall in love with this life, it is a sure ticket to death, for it we fall in love with this life, we are not in love with God, but with a created thing. We are to love the Creator, not the created things. However, if we deeply desire the Creator, then we will grow to hate the created things because they are nothing when compared to the beauty of the Creator. Only the perfection, the intricacy, the delicate details of the Creator will, in the long run satisfy us. Eventually, if we desire the Creator, we will be sick of the things of this world as an eight-year-old who has worked his first day in a candy shop with permission to sample anything in the shop.

My wife is a great cook, and has learned the places on the Internet to find recipes and techniques which allow her to make almost anything. It really has spoiled me, for she adapts the recipes to our family’s tastes, and so it means that restaurant food doesn’t taste nearly as good as it once did when I was a single engineer living in Johnson City, TN.

As we study God and see the things God does, the beauty of God and God’s actions make even God’s creations on this earth look poorly done as the effects of the Fall work on everything. Yes, I can see how loving God will lead to hating the world.

After asking God to glorify His Name – and God responding, Jesus continues:

31 Now is the time for judgment on this world; now the prince of this world will be driven out.

It appears that Jesus’ death was directly involved in driving out “the prince of this world, “ who we know by the name of Satan. From the time of Adam, Satan has ruled the earth. From the time of Eve, people have listened and believed Satan’s lies. From the time of the Fall, God has allowed Satan to rule the world as God planned God’s conquest.

God, at any time, could have directly assaulted the earth with an angel army and directly defeated Satan. But, as we know, war means suffering and death. Those are the food of Satan, they are the meat and bread that he eats, those are the very things that Satan loves.

When we attack our enemies through direct action, we have bought into certain lies that Satan has spread.

First, we believe that we can obtain a victory. Yet anyone who has killed another person, or injured them, even by accident, knows the damage that happens to your soul. Those men who came back from the first World War were damaged by the constant fear of death as the shells exploded over their trenches night-after-night. But those who came back from more recent wars were damaged as much or more by their visions of killing men and women, sometimes children, who were shooting at them. They were placed in a position of “kill or be killed” and had to make a decision. But it was a no win decision, and Satan knew that before he set up the situation. He manipulated those men and women into a situation where they would be damaged, no matter what they did. And now, we pick up the pieces by helping men and women recognize that God will forgive them, for they had no good choice.

The same happens to those who injure others in accidents – or even injure animals. About ten years ago, we had a cute little dog named Betty who liked to chase mice and voles in the fields around our home. Unfortunately, Betty chase a vole out into the highway and a woman hit Betty with her car. The woman was completely devastated, for she had terrible difficulty forgiving herself.

So God would not assault the earth through direct action and bring the planet and the people to loyalty through war, for that would harm his loyal followers as well as those God’s army defeated. Besides, God gave us free will and considers that free will to be more important for us than all the damage caused by wars and famines and torture throughout all the ages. And so, God decided upon a much more subtle plan.

God decided first to teach us what was right and what was wrong. God gave Moses the Law, a list of the Ten Commandments and over 600 detailed commands about what was right – and what was wrong. Part of it was to remind us of God’s character and power. Part of it was to show us how to live with each other. And over the centuries some people did a pretty good job of following the Law and others did a pretty poor job of following the Law. But the Law was only given to the descendents of Jacob – the House of Israel.

The Law led us to know what was right – and what was wrong. And we found that none of us could follow the law perfectly. In fact, by the time Jesus arrived, we’d gotten pretty good at living to the letter of the Law, mainly by re-interpreting the Law to mean whatever was convenient for us. Just like anyone, a ruler should not steal? Call it a tax, then. Someone brings his best lamb for sacrifice and you want to make some money as a priest? Insist that the lamb is not good enough and require him to buy a different lamb from your brother-in-law. Like to spend time with the ladies? Insist that adultery is only something that happens when a married woman spends time with a married man – if a married man spends time with an unmarried woman, say it isn’t adultery. These things happened!

So God then sent Jesus to planet earth, to teach a better way, to move people beyond the letter of the Law into the basic concepts that we are to love God and love each other, and do those things which accomplish those intents. And while He was telling us this, Jesus showed us this also by spending the bulk of His ministry with the people who were not loved, the people who were different, the people who were too poor to pay for friendship.

And then…gently at first, and then louder and louder… Jesus claimed to be God.

And people were forced to make a decision. Was Jesus God or not?

Many decided that He could not be God and stopped following Jesus from that point. The crowds were still large, but they weren’t continually growing. Many people could not grasp the idea that God was walking with them. But the core disciples – and in particular, about a 120 other men and women – decided to stick with Him. They believed.

But then, Jesus announced He had to die.

It had been predicted in the scriptures, it was scattered all through the Psalms and Isaiah and Jeremiah. Psalm 53 was particularly clear about it – join us on Good Friday and we’ll read it.

Yes, it was all over scripture that the Messiah, the Savior, the Christ had to die. But why?

In the Law, there were many sacrifices established as penalties for breaking the Law. For this crime against God’s Law, you sacrificed a pair of doves. For that crime against God’s Law, you sacrificed a quart of flour. For another crime, you sacrificed a sheep or a goat, and for another crime, you sacrificed a perfect young bull. In a time of farmers and herders, when cash money was rare and not found in the household of the average person, these sacrifices of valuable food and livestock were truly sacrifices that meant something.

And then, once a year, the high priest of Israel on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement at the harvest festival – on that day the high priest of Israel would take the best bull that the priests could find, the most valuable creature in the land, and the high priest would kill the bull and catch his blood in a special basin. Then, fully purified, his prayers said – and his last will and testament written – the high priest would walk into the Holy Sanctuary where the other priests would tie a rope around his leg, and then the high priest would walk into the innermost Holy of Holies, where the Ark of the Covenant sat in its gleaning splendor holding the tablets upon which was the Law itself, the tablets that Moses brought back from the mountain, the rod of Aaron, some manna, and there on the top of the Ark was the Mercy Seat where the presence of God was, and there on that special spot, the high priest, trembling in fear lest he had done anything wrong, the high priest would pour the precious blood of that precious bull as an offering to God so that God would forgive all the other crimes that the people of Israel had committed against God over the last year and had not sacrificed for. The bull covered everything that was left. It was a propitiation, a special sacrifice to please God.

And then, if he was still alive, the high priest left the Holy of Holies, and did not return for another year. The rope around his leg, you see, was in case he made a mistake and was stricken dead by God. But if he left safely, all was right between the people of Israel, and God.

And this was the situation when Jesus came to town that week, and the Greeks came to Phillip and then to Andrew.

But Jesus and God understood two additional things.

First, they understood that in about 40 years, the Temple would be destroyed by the Romans. The sacrifices would stop, the Atonement could not be made, the bull could not pay for the sins of the people of Israel thereafter. Something new had to be arranged.

Second, they understood that there were many people in the world who were not of the House of Israel. There were many people who were not Jews in the world, and the Law had been given just to the Jews. How should all the non-Jewish people of the world be right with God? How should people like the Greeks, like you and like me pay for our sins. If we could not sacrifice at the Temple, what possible way could we get right with God?

And so, long before time existed, it was decided that there should be a Christ that walked upon the earth, and it was decided that that Christ should suffer and die, and it was decided that the Christ – who was the Word of God and was God – should replace the bull as the grand atoning sacrifice of all time.

You see, the value of the Son of God is far more than the value of all the animals upon the earth, far more than the value of all the jewels and gold and silver in the earth, and even more than the value of the earth itself. And thus, the sacrifice of the Son of God was the only thing valuable enough to pay for all the crimes against God that all the people of the world have committed or will commit. This is what we mean by “Jesus paid the price”.

Imagine, if you will, that one day you discover that the Highway patrol has been working with the NSA, and has satellite data that shows all the times you’ve traveled over the speed limit, and sends you a bill which itemizes each time you passed the speed limit, going back to the day you got your driver’s license and adding penalty and interest. How many of us could pay the bill?

Furthermore, imagine that hidden cameras and hidden microphones have tracked every single time you muttered under your breath a threat such as “I’m going to kill that child!” or said something like, “I wish I had that car”, and you received in the mail a sentence for threatening others, for contemplating theft, and for any other crime you’ve merely thought about committing, no matter how small or petty, or how jokingly you meant the comment, even the time when you were angry at your bully neighbor when you were 5 years old and told your mother, “I want him to die”. How many years would you need to spend in prison?

Since God is the perfect policeman, and has all the evidence, there is no dancing around – God knows all about you. You are in big trouble, and you cannot pay the bill, you cannot do the time for all the crime you’ve committed in your mind.

Jesus had to pay the bill for you, Jesus had to do the time, and Jesus had to pay for your mental murders – and mine, too.

But God, Jesus, and Holy Spirit love you, so Jesus chose to die. And when He died upon that cross, the penalties for all the crimes against God and others were paid for, once and for all. That bill for all those speeding tickets? Paid in full. That list of back-to-back sentences without parole? Paroled and expunged from you record. Everything you’ve been accused of? Charges dropped. Debt paid. All is forgiven. Remember our first reading from Jeremiah? “Declares the Lord. “For I will forgive their wickedness and will remember their sins no more.”

And all you have to do is say and believe, “Thank you, Jesus! I believe that You were capable of paying the price.”

That is why Jesus had to die. A sacrifice was needed and we were each bankrupt, so Jesus stepped in and paid our fines.

Finally, though, let’s talk about what set Him off – the arrival of the Greeks. I suppose the best way to illustrate this is to go back to that busload of Chinese Christian tourists. Remember them? When you met them at the 7/11 this morning, they didn’t just ask to be taken to your church – they said they were looking for Quiet Dell Church because they had heard of it and wanted to learn how we did church that was so much better than the other churches. You’d be thinking – our fame has spread even to China? Well, maybe someday….

When those Greeks arrived, they were notable because they were not Jews. Everyone else who came to speak with Jesus was a local – a Pharisee, a temple priest, the local people, even the Roman guards. But now, people from out-of-town – even out of the country – were asking to talk to Jesus.

Jesus knew, you see, that His mission wasn’t just to the Jews. Although He personally was to speak, as He said, “to the lost sheep of Israel”, His disciples were to carry His Words and connect Him to the rest of the world. So Jesus understood that the time had come at last for Him to be lifted up just like that bronze snake that Moses made in the wilderness so all could be healed, that the time had come for the Son of God to suffer and die, the time had come for the prophecies to be fulfilled as Jesus became high “priest forever, in the order of Melchizedek.” (Melchizedek was the high priest of God in Salem - the town that later became Jerusalem - at the time of Abraham, far before Moses brought down the Law and the Levitical and Aaronic priesthood was established. See Genesis 14.)

Jesus then turned His face toward the cross. Not willingly – but obediently. For there was no other way.

On that Good Friday outside of Jerusalem, Jesus truly became the Christ, the Savior, the Messiah, the High Priest forever of God, and the ultimate atoning sacrifice as the Son of God was killed like a sacrificial lamb for the sins which we have each committed. It was the only way for God to bring us back to God, for in any other way, God’s wonderful integrity, God’s wonderful goodness, God’s perfect holiness would have been violated. And so, like a lamb to the slaughter, Jesus went.

And when His life-giving blood left Him, Death died. Now, we just wait around for everyone to get the news. The game is won – the ball is held, the clock is running out. Jesus won, for He said that those who believe in Him will have eternal life, and we know that this is true because before the weekend was over, Jesus – the One who had been sacrificed – was walking around, strolling several miles, eating fish, talking and teaching again to His friends, and His body was alive again.

Death was dead – a mere annoyance to those who believe, less of a problem than a kidney stone, a tale to frighten naughty children, but nothing for mature, believing adults to be worried about. “O Death, where is thy victory? O Death, where is thy sting?”

Today, we give thanks to Jesus. Today, we give thanks to God. Today, we come to the altar and say, “Thanks be to God for all He has done for me”. Feel free to come forward and kneel or stand at the altar rail to tell God what His Son has done for you. Show your gratitude. Perhaps you need to ask something of God – come forward and ask it. Perhaps you have a friend or relative who needs to hear about God’s Son. Come forward and pray for your friend or neighbor. Come to the altar, look upon the Son of God, and be healed.

Why People Won’t Believe

Numbers 21:4-9; Psalm 107:1-3, 17-22; Ephesians 2:1-10; John 3:14-21

As we go through our daily lives, we encounter many people. Some of those people we encounter are like the Irishman I met in Rome, Italy. He was a butcher and was from Dublin. He was in the hotel bar – I’d stopped in to get an orange juice, for I was feeling a cold or flu coming on, and Barry the Irish Butcher was there, and he was NOT drinking orange juice. When he found out I was a minister, his question for me was “Do you believe in Him!” pointing to the crucifix around his neck. It was clear that Barry believed, and he wanted to be certain that I believed also.

Then again, we meet other people in our lives. There was a woman Saundra and I knew when we lived in one place, who had some faith and went to church a couple of times a year. A few years later, Saundra got a call from her. It seems that she had gotten pregnant when she was in college and had an abortion. Now, fifteen years later, she was pregnant with the husband she loved, and the impact of what she had done so many years earlier came back to her. She called Saundra, because she could not bear the guilt of what she had done, and she knew that Saundra could advise her on what to do, so she came and visited us for a week while Saundra walked her through how faith in God includes understanding that God will forgive any sin if you are truly repentant – and our friend was truly repentant. She left with a renewed and stronger commitment to her life – and to God.

And then you meet the people who will not believe, like the man I once worked with who beat testicular cancer himself – his words, not mine. He considered a belief in God to be a sign of weakness – and a restriction upon his wild life-style, which consisted of finding a new woman each night we were on the road, spending the night with her, and using all sorts of chemicals to feel good. After six months on the job, I took over his job when he was fired, and years later I heard that his cancer had come back with a vengeance.

Why won’t some people believe in the God of heaven and His Son Jesus Christ? This is what is important. But we often ask the wrong question – we phrase it this way: Why won’t some people come to church?

You see, the reason people won’t come to church is because they are not Christians. It is as simple as that. They don’t come to church because they are not Christians. They do not believe in Jesus the Christ. They do not believe that Jesus is truly God’s Son, part of God in a complex way.

Now saying that these people are not Christians can be offensive to some people, and I realize this. And there are a few people out there who are truly Christians and won’t come to church. But 95% of the time, the root reason people don’t come to church is because they are not Christians. That may be offensive, but there are times when it is important to tell the difference between dogs and cats, and this is one of those times. It is IMPORTANT! For you see, John wrote that Jesus said, talking about Himself: (John 3:18) Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because they have not believed in the name of God’s one and only Son.

In our world, we have many people who “believe in God”. But that is not Christianity. The belief in God is the mark of being a “Theist”, a believer in the existence of a god. All Christians are theists, but not all theists are Christians. In fact, far less than half of the theists in the world are Christians. There is a serious difference between believing in a vague god, and believing that Jesus Christ is actually God in a complex way. For most people who “believe in God” believe in one of two different gods.

The first is the kindly grandfather god who will give you whatever you need when you pray to him and who will never do anything which would cause you harm. This is the kindly god that rescues you when you are in trouble and might give you presents. Yet, this is the same god who might also punish you for doing bad things. In the mind of the believers, there is this all powerful human figure that is running the show, and who either loves them or picks on them. But this god is not whom Christians worship.

The other extreme is the vague, distant force that is way up there in the heavens, at a distance that never steps into our lives unless we are in desperate circumstances. There is no real personality to this god, and this distant god mostly ignores us. This is the god that we want to keep its distance from us except when we need to turn it into the kindly grandfather god. This is the god we want to stay somewhere up in the sky away from us, and not get too close to us. But this god is not the God of Christianity, either.

In Christianity, we believe explicitly in a three-in-one God – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Three personalities, one substance. And we believe that the Son, who is the Word and Wisdom of God, came to earth in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, a person who was 100% God and 100% human. God walked upon the earth as Jesus Christ. And it is this person that we call the Christ, the Savior, the Messiah. It is this person that experienced hatred and worship, harsh beatings with whips and a gentle anointing with perfume, a death and a Resurrection.

And it is this person, Jesus Christ, who is carefully ignored by most of the people in America who don’t come to church. It is this person who is, at best, considered to be a good man, a good ethical teacher, perhaps even one who speaks on behalf of God - by those who do not know Him.

You can tell if someone is not a Christian by a simple test. Ask the person if they are a Christian. If they answer something like, “I am. I was born again in 1989 – or received Christ in 1995” or responds with an answer that uses the word “Christ” in it or mentions “Jesus” - then you can be pretty sure your friend is a Christian.

However, if you friend responds with “Yes, I believe in God” or something similar and does not mention the words “Christ” or “Jesus”, then you have met a theist who is not a Christian. He or she may claim to be a Christian – but they have missed a key point – the divine nature of Jesus Christ. And if you ask a few more questions, you will see that this is true.

A few years ago, I taught an adult Sunday School class in a large, fast-growing church. I quickly discovered that about half of the people in the class, some of whom had been attending church for decades, believed that Jesus was simply a wise man who taught good moral lessons. They pushed back at me when I taught that Jesus was indeed God in the flesh, as the leaders of Christianity decided almost two thousand years ago. I guess the people in this class hadn't received the memo!

Do you not see, there is no reason to follow the teachings of Jesus Christ over the teachings of Buddha, of Plato, of Aristotle, of Doctor Phil, or your favorite politician if Jesus Christ is simply a wise man? If Jesus was just another wise man, then today I might believe in Jesus and next year follow Buddha. In a decade I’ll listen to the tapes of Depak Chopra, and then the teachings of Oprah Winfrey. God knows that if you only listen to Jesus because you see Him as just another wise teacher, you will not follow Him through eternity, but will instead develop your own philosophy, your own teachings, your own sayings, and become your own god on day.

And, in addition, since Jesus claimed repeatedly to be God, and was executed for the crime of claiming to be God, who should we follow if Jesus is not God? For why should we listen to a nutcase who claimed to be God and wasn’t? So the question becomes….Was Jesus God or not? The answer to this question is core to our salvation, for it is how God decides whether you will be loyal through the ages … or not.

God saw that this question would come up. This is one reason why Jesus had to suffer and die, as predicted in the Old Testament and by Christ Himself before His death. His death paid the sacrifice price for all of our sins; His Resurrection was how God called attention to the words of Christ, confirmed that Jesus was indeed divine, and said to us, as God had said earlier to Peter, “This is my beloved Son. Listen to Him!”

Yet many people will not believe. As Christian pollster George Barna says, they prefer to believe in a mildly therapeutic theism. It is therapeutic because it makes people feel good to think that there is a god. It is theism because they believe in a god.

Yet, according to John, Jesus said, “ 19 This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but people loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil.20 Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that their deeds will be exposed. “

Consider, if you will, that the Church shines forth that light of Christ.

In today’s society, most people like to claim that the character of God is a matter of opinion. They like this idea and are comfortable with it, because it actually allows them to define and manage the character of the god they worship. They are completely in control of their god. And when you talk with them, you will find that their god is rather vague and non-specific.

You see, most people who are theists like to keep their god vague, because a vague god doesn’t have any requirements Most people who are theists like to manage their god’s character well, because a managed god is like a child’s doll who only says the things we want to hear.

Most people who are theists like to stay away from church, because the Word of God is read in church and that Word can be uncomfortable and require a change of behavior to accommodate the living God. You see, the living God isn’t tame and can’t be managed. The living God will not be anyone’s doll. The Word of God shines a light on all those evil deeds, and that is very uncomfortable for most people.

The theists who walk around us and claim to be Christians are much like those people who drive around, occasionally looking up at the electric wires overhead, ignoring the power that flows through those wires, the power that can destroy lives and towns. The people are confident that that electricity is completely under control. But those who have worked with 480 volts, with higher voltages than that, understand that electricity is a wild and dangerous thing, barely under control, and is not to be taken lightly. God is the same and even more – God is never under control, and never can safely be ignored.

And so we find that the real reason people don’t come to church is because they aren’t Christians. Those who aren’t Christians don’t believe in the God-nature of Jesus Christ, because it would mean that they would have to change their actions, their beliefs, and their morals to fit in line with a God who actually has the power to lift them up or destroy them, who created the Universe and can destroy cities, who has most definite ideas of what is right – and what is wrong. They ignore God at their peril.

Now, there are a few Christians who stay home because they are ill or infirm. But what of the man or woman who says, “I can worship at home as well as in church – and there aren’t nearly as many hypocrites at home!”

I have truly met a few Christians like this, who stayed at home and read their Bible and did good works to the people around them. But not many. When pressed, most people who say they worship at home will admit that they almost never read their Bible, and instead just got upset at someone in some church who said something to them they didn’t like. They understand that God can be worshipped everywhere, but yet they have given tremendous power to other people to keep them from deeply worshipping God, experiencing God with others, working together with others to channel the powers of God to do good in their community. They are like a single candle burning by itself, sputtering and ready to flicker out, while a strong church body is like a blowtorch of the Spirit, igniting everything around it and cutting through the hardened steel of the world.

“But Pastor, I come to church almost every week! What does this have to do with me?”

John wrote that Jesus said: 16 For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. 17 For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him.18 Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because they have not believed in the name of God’s one and only Son.

As Barry the Irish Butcher said: “Do you believe in Him?” Do you believe in the God-nature of God’s son? If you do, you have eternal life. If you don’t you are condemned.

My friends, once in a while it is my duty to call your attention to the friends, neighbors, and family around you and point out that those who do not believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God are condemned by God. Eternal life hangs in the balance for our friends, our neighbors, and our family.

Around us, every day, there are people who are dying and will spend eternity apart from God. It is the greatest epidemic in the history of the world – more people experiencing death and misery thereafter than any Ebola outbreak, than any swine flu outbreak, than any epidemic of the Black death. People are dying in their separation from God simply because they think that Jesus was just another wise teacher and no one has told them anything differently. Should this get us upset! Yes!

Last week we saw that Jesus flipped over tables and chased people with a whip because they had merely put a barrier to people coming to God. How much more passionate is He about those who never speak of Him to others? Where is your passion for God?

Tell me – how will the people around us find out about the love of Christ unless we tell them? Shall we trust that they will turn on Trinity Broadcasting and listen to TD Jakes in Dallas or Charles Stanley in Atlanta or Joseph Prince from Singapore? Shall we just assume that one night they’ll listen to a Billy Graham re-run?

Or perhaps, just perhaps, we discover that we believe in the truth of the Gospel so much that one evening over dinner in our home, our friend, our neighbor, our family member hears that we believe that Jesus Christ is actually the Son of God, and we tell them five stories that explain “why” from our own life.

You see, people don’t believe in Jesus Christ because no one they trust, no one they respect, no one who loves them has told them the whole story.

And perhaps you don’t know the story very well. Perhaps you don’t understand how things happened. Perhaps you are like the man Andy met recently, who never understood the Bible because he had an old King James Bible and it was hard to read. This man was in prison, was put in solitary confinement, and someone gave him a new, modern translation. He read the Gospels in the new translation and it was so simple, so straight-forward, so easy that he came to Christ in his jail cell and, now released, is moving into ministry to bring others to Christ.

Get yourself a modern translation and read the Gospels, particularly Mark and John. You might find you will then spend the week reading the rest of the New Testament.

And then, you can begin to tell people what you’ve learned to the people who trust you, who respect you, who know you love them. Who are those people? Who do you love who has not yet accepted that Jesus is God Himself, walking upon this earth, and so His words are the very Words of God?

I have sometimes asked this of a person to start the conversation – “Do you know the real difference between Christianity and other religions such as Islam or Buddhism? Neither Mohammed, nor Buddha claimed to be God. But Jesus Christ claimed to be God. Repeatedly. The Gospel of John is very clear about that. Time after time Jesus uses the phrase “I AM”, which was short for “I am that I am”, the name that God gave Moses when God appeared in the burning bush. And the people around Jesus pick up stones to stone Him for claiming to be God. They understood His claim and eventually Jesus was executed for this crime. His Resurrection was God’s proof that Jesus was exactly who He said He was. And so the difference between Christianity and other religions is that Jesus was God speaking on this earth – and so Jesus’ words are the Word of God. If you don’t believe me, read the Gospel of John.”

To paraphrase C.S.Lewis, Jesus was either God or a liar or a nutcase. Don’t give me any of this idea that He was just a wise teacher, for He did not intend to leave us that option. Read the Gospels – particularly the Gospel of John – and decide: Was Jesus a liar, a nutcase, or the Lord of all creation?

And when you decide He is Lord, as Barry the Irish Butcher knew, as our pregnant friend knew, as over a billion other people agree: all will be well with your Soul.

How Faith Works

Genesis 17:1-7, 15-16; Psalm 22:23-31; Romans 4:13-25; Mark 8:31-38

When I was a young boy, I often watched Westerns on television. Of course, given my age, I had a distorted view of the Westerns, since I was born a few years too late for the golden age of the Westerns on television. My Westerns were Bonanza, Gunsmoke, and those two oddball Westerns – the Wild, Wild West, and F-Troop.

If you’ve ever watched a Western, you know that there were certain stereotypes you could count on – the good guys wore white hats, the bad guys wore black hats, there was a strong leading man who was a great shot, six-shot revolvers held 22 bullets, and the Native American Indians were unpredictable. You also knew that in the last ten minutes of the show or movie, the hero or heroes will get pinned down in a firefight, surrounded by Indians or outlaws, when suddenly you’d hear a bugle sound the charge and the undefeatable United States Cavalry would charge to the rescue.

You could always count on the Cavalry to arrive just when things were getting bad. In fact, you had a tremendous faith in the goodness and the integrity of the young Cavalry commander, who always managed to show up with a company of men on horseback with rifles and carbines blazing. The Cavalry were going to be there – you could count on it. In fact, if the Cavalry did not rescue the good guys, we considered it to be a strange episode. We had such faith in the Cavalry.

And we even see this in more modern movies. At the end of Saving Private Ryan, the tanks show up just in time to rescue the good guys. And much the same thing happens in our crime dramas – twenty uniformed cops show up just in time to rescue the detectives. It is something embedded deep into our consciousness that says this is the way things are supposed to be. A great and powerful force rescues us from our certain death – and we have great faith in that force, whether it be the Cavalry, the tanks, the boys-in-blue – or in God.

Abraham was told by God that he would become the father of a nation. In fact, God changed his name from Abram, which means “exalted father”, to Abraham, which means “father of many”. His wife’s name was changed from Sarai, which means “my princess” – almost a pet name that emphasizes Abraham’s love for Sarai, to Sarah, which means simply “princess” or “noblewoman”, a more substantial title which emphasizes her position in the nation of people descended from her. It is from these two people that both Jews and Arabs claim descent.

God said to him, 4 “As for me, this is my covenant with you: You will be the father of many nations. 5 No longer will you be called Abram[b]; your name will be Abraham,[c] for I have made you a father of many nations. 6 I will make you very fruitful; I will make nations of you, and kings will come from you.

How joyful! To a man who had no children, this was a wonderful promise. There was only one problem with this picture. Abraham was 99 years old at the time, and Sarah was nearly the same age. And yet, they are to have children?

We look back in time and we know the end of the story. We know that Abraham did have two sons, and from his grandson Jacob came the twelve tribes of Israel, which about 500 years later numbered around 600,000 people.

Yet, Abraham did not know the end of the story. Yet, as Paul says when writing his letter to the Romans, “18 Against all hope, Abraham in hope believed and so became the father of many nations, just as it had been said to him…”

It has been said that faith is another word for “relationship”. Abraham had a relationship with God by this time. He trusted God – and he knew that God had the power to do what God promised. So if God said that at the end of Abraham’s life he would have children, then Abraham trusted that he would have children, just as we trusted that the Cavalry would arrive in time to rescue the good guys in those Westerns.

Faith, you see, requires trust. It requires that the One in which we have faith can safely be trusted. And in order to trust someone, we must see in them an integrity where we know that the promises they make are promises they will attempt to fulfill. In other words, the One in which we have faith must have a deep integrity, demonstrated to us over time.

God has that integrity. We see that integrity in many different ways. First, we see that our Universe still exists. God created the Universe and maintains it. If God were to stop maintaining the Universe, it would collapse and disappear in less than a second.

The Deists were a group of men from the late 1700’s who believed that God created the Universe and then walked away, letting it function like a giant machine, but not paying any further attention to it. Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson may have been Deists. But the Deists were wrong. Our modern science of quantum mechanics has shown us that something amazing happens at the atomic level, that a negatively charged electron circles a positively charged nucleus in each atom.

Yet, according to everything we know, those electrons should spiral into the nucleus in less than second, and all the atoms in the Universe should collapse. And yet this hasn’t happened. And so the physicists simply tell us that the electrons don’t spiral in and instead circle the nucleus, but, speaking as a physicist, we really don’t know why. We know how those electrons behave, but they don’t behave the way they ought to behave. And so quantum mechanics describes how they behave, but can’t explain why.

But speaking as a theologian, the answer is simple. God actively maintains the Universe and keeps it functioning. Why? Perhaps because God cares for us? Every second that we exist is further proof of the integrity of God, God’s essential goodness, God’s essential honesty.

A child gets bored of a pet and might let it starve. But a man or woman with integrity knows that when you take on a pet, you have made a life-long commitment to that pet, promising to feed it and protect it and – when the end comes – help it to die without suffering.

God has integrity. God keeps the promises God makes.

There is another aspect to this faith. For most people, while we may have trust in the honesty of a person, we may question their power to keep their promises. For example, last week, a UPS truck caught fire in Anmore and the contents of the truck were destroyed – all of the packages. UPS has excellent honesty – but that fire kept those packages from being delivered. UPS did not have the power to prevent that fire.

Yet God has the power to deliver on God’s promises. Any promise God makes will be kept. And so, we can have faith in God.

But how and why does faith in God make a difference in this Universe? To understand, we must go back to the Garden of Eden and the Fall. You will recall that God put a tree in the Garden and said to Adam: “You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; 17 but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat from it you will certainly die.”

In the Garden, the direct cause of Eve eating the fruit from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil were the words of the serpent.

He said to the woman, “Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden’?”

2 The woman said to the serpent, “We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden, 3 but God did say, ‘You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die.’”

4 “You will not certainly die,” the serpent said to the woman. 5 “For God knows that when you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”

6 When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it.

The issue, you see was trust. It was Eve’s lack of trust – her lack of faith – in the goodness of God that led her to fall for the serpent’s words.

Eve did like we all do – we decided to trust in the created things of this world and the words of those creatures rather than have faith in what God had said. It even happened to Peter, and Peter tried to make it happen to Jesus:

31 He [Jesus] then began to teach them that the Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests and the teachers of the law, and that he must be killed and after three days rise again. 32 He spoke plainly about this, and Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him.

33 But when Jesus turned and looked at his disciples, he rebuked Peter. “Get behind me, Satan!” he said. “You do not have in mind the concerns of God, but merely human concerns.”

Following human concerns – following the ways of the world that we’ve been taught as we grew up by our friends, our classmates, our teachers, our television, our movies, our books, and even in many cases by our parents – is can lead us to trouble. Jesus was so upset about Peter being caught up in the ways of the world that Jesus even called Peter “Satan”, the name of the devil.

When we face the world and look toward it and trust in what it teaches us, we can do no better than the rest of the world. And in much of the world, we see the effects of the world’s teaching – war, violence, hunger, disease, poverty, depression, hopelessness, and sadness. Why do these things happen in the world?

It is mainly because most people substitute fear for faith in God. Fear frightens us. When we are frightened, we do stupid things. We don’t look at the long view and instead we take the short view. Our fear leads us to become angry because we can’t control our future – or hand it over to a loving God who can control that future. And when we become angry, we gradually begin to hate. When we hate, we do things that injure others, and this leads to suffering – more and more suffering. Fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, and hate leads to suffering.

But when we truly have faith in what God’s promises are, God also knows then that God can trust us. And for some reason, as we increase in our faith, we see God’s actions more clearly. And as we see God’s actions more clearly, our faith in God grows stronger and stronger. And the cycle continues and we become more confident. When we face God, we do godly things.

For ultimately, our faith in God is like our faith that the Cavalry will arrive just in the nick of time. When we deeply believe that God will show up in time, we lose our fear. Faith destroys fear. And thus the cycle is broken. Our growing trust and friendship in God is our faith and this removes our fear. And with faith instead of fear, we have patience. With patience comes planning and wisdom and the doing of good things.

Let me give you an example of two families.

Fred and Harriett have two kids. One day, Harriet discovers that her neighbor has a bare pantry – no food in the house. Harriet thinks about giving her some food or money to buy her food, but then the teachings of the world sink into her. Harriet thinks: “If my friend is out of food, that means that I could one day be out of food. I need to keep all the money I can so I will never be out of food.” Perhaps Harriet finds out that other people around are running short of money to buy food. Now Harriet begins to think “What if I am robbed by someone who is desperate for food?” and she begins to stay in her house, locking all the doors and worrying about her neighbors. She won’t let her kids play with the neighbors. When she sees a neighbor standing in front of the house, she rudely yells “Go away” to him, and soon the neighbors all think of her as a mean, nasty woman. Very soon they talk and she has no friends. Neither do their kids.

On the other hand, George and Mary also have kids. When Mary finds out that her neighbor has no food, she thinks about giving her some food or money to buy her food, but Mary has a strong faith in God. So Mary trusts that if John and Mary were to run out of food, God would provide for them. Mary gives her neighbor some food, and gives to her other neighbors. Gradually, Mary becomes known as a wonderful woman who loves everyone. Her kids learn from her and become well-liked around the neighborhood as well. Everyone treats them well. And one day, when George’s business gets in trouble, the neighbors take up a collection and bring them enough to handle the business problems. You might want to watch the movies “It’s a Wonderful Life” to see what faith in action does.

Faith in God as our ultimate Cavalry and faith in God’s promises can completely change our world. There is a tremendous difference between two men when one feels that everything is up to him and the other understands that God loves him and won’t let him fall. Our faith in God has changed us – and then we can change the world. It is the faith itself that changes the world – not any direct action of God. It is just our recognition of the integrity and goodness and power that is Who God is. You might say, it is simply God’s glory that changes the world.

And this is borne out by an episode that happens to Jesus. There is a woman who has been sick and bleeding for several years. She hears of Jesus and thinks, “If I can only touch Jesus’ clothes, He will make me well.” One day, Jesus comes to her town and in a crowd she manages to touch his cloak. Jesus instantly stops and says, “Who touched me?” The woman comes forward, frightened, because women did not touch men in that society who were not their husband. They talk a moment, and Jesus says, “You faith has healed you.” He doesn’t say, “My power has healed you.” No, Jesus says to the woman; “ Your faith has healed you.”

And we see this today. Doctors and nurses know of what is called the “Placebo effect”. In medicine, a placebo is a pill made out of simply suger and a coating. It has no real medicine in it. Yet, in many tests of many different medicines, the placebo cures people. The actual cure comes from their faith in the medicine’s ability to cure.

I have a challenge for any atheists in the audience today. Begin to act as though God will fulfill the promises God has made. Run an experiment – find out if the Cavalry comes. And you’ll find something out – as long as you are skeptical, God will not appear. But as soon as you truly adopt an open mind, you’ll begin to see some interesting things happen. And when you begin to believe – you may hear a bugle call in the distance when you truly need it.

Faith in God works because God wants to be able to work on your heart throughout eternity. If you trust God, God can work with you. If you don’t – you are in rebellion and cannot be worked with except through coercion and force. And God will not force you to believe. God is too good, too holy, --too polite to force you.

But if you recognize that you don’t control the Cavalry, then God will arrive and begin to build that trusting relationship with you. And when you understand the sacrifice that Jesus made for you so that you and God could have a close relationship, you will understand God’s goodness.

Around 30 AD, a man named Jesus of Nazareth began to preach in northern Israel and around Jerusalem. His message was that God wanted a close relationship with all people – not just the priests, not just the good people, but all people, including the very lowest, struggling, most desperate members of society – those who could not afford the Temple sacrifices, those who could not afford to dress properly, those who could not own farms and nice homes and be married to the king’s daughter or son.

Repeatedly, this man Jesus claimed to be God Himself walking upon this earth. And every time He did this, the crowds became upset at Him for His so-called blaspheme. Yet He was reported to heal people and do other miraculous things that implied a supernatural power was at work.

Finally, in priest-run Jerusalem he challenged the powers that be and was arrested, tried, and executed for the crime of claiming to be God. This was on a Friday. He was hastily put into a tomb before sundown according to Jewish custom of the time.

On Sunday morning, women who were visiting His burial tomb to clean and properly bury the body were astonished to find that He was no longer there. They ran to tell others. That day, Jesus walked up to several groups of followers and talked with them and even ate with them. Over the next 40 days, He showed up at least eleven times in different locations and circumstances. In one case there were over 500 witnesses present. He taught his followers and then the eyewitnesses claim He ascended to Heaven.

Miraculous events continued to occur with His followers, so often that about 200 years later, Christianity became the dominant religion of the Roman Empire. Today over 2 Billion people claim to be Christian.

The death of Jesus was to pay for all the sacrifices that needed paid for all the crimes against God that were committed over the centuries by billions of people, including you …and me. God Himself in a complicated way – we say Jesus was the Son of God, but it is a rather complicated thing – God Himself was of infinite value and the only thing valuable enough to pay the bill.

The Resurrection of Jesus was for a rather simple reason. It was God’s way of calling attention to Jesus. Yes, we agree that people don’t just come back from the dead. Yes, we agree that this was something unique in history. Yes, we agree that this has never been seen before – or after. There is only one true Son of God. And God wanted us to listen to what Jesus said.

Jesus said that those people who believe in Him – who have faith in Him – will have eternal life. If this is false, it is the greatest lie in the history of the world. If it is true – it is the most important thing that has ever been said. Take some time to examine this in detail. Take some time to read and study the claims of Jesus. Take some time to determine if we here – and such other people as Abraham Lincoln, Isaac Newton, Winston Churchill, John F Kennedy, and Martin Luther King, Jr. – are crazy for having faith in Jesus or not. Does the Cavalry exist or not, ready to ride into your life?

It is interesting that the hill upon which Jesus was executed has an old, old name. The hill was called in Aramaic Golgotha, the place of the skull. In Greek, this became Kraniou Topos and then in Latin, Calvarae Locus, the place of the skull. And thus, in many older hymns and Bibles, the place where Jesus was crucified is known as Mount Calvary.

Have faith. Your faith alone has the power to change the world. But your faith, combined with the Calvary that lies behind it, is undefeatable. Have faith.

Change My Heart

Genesis 9:8-17; Psalm 25:1-10; 1 Peter 3:18-22; Mark 1:9-15

Last weekend, on Saturday, Andy and I went to Morgantown so that he could attend “Merit Badge University”, a day-long event where he could take one of two dozen merit badges offered, which included one he needed to qualify for Eagle Scout. So we left the house around 7 AM with the temperature outside running in the single digits, and drove to Morgantown.

The merit badge course lasted all day. I spent my time eating breakfast, taking a nap, walking around a couple of buildings on campus to see how they’d changed since I was last there, and reading. It snowed. I read for hours. And I watched more snow fall and blow around the campus. You’ll remember that it poured down the snow that afternoon.

Finally, around 4 pm, the classes began to finish. Scouts came to check out. No Andy. 4:30 – no Andy. 5 pm, and still no Andy. Finally, the last class to finish showed up around 5:15, and there was Andy. He got checked out and we went outside to scrap the ice off our little gray Honda Fit and head for Quiet Dell as the sun set over Morgantown – and the snow poured down.

The drive home is normally about 45 minutes. But that assumes that you are traveling at 70 miles an hour most of the way. That night, the snow was still coming down, the ice was sitting on the roads, and the traffic was moving at about 40 miles an hour, sometimes moving at 25 miles an hour.

We drove through the darkness. I gripped the wheel with both hands with a death grip. Tractor-trailers flew past me and their bow wave of wind tossed us to the right. But the lane was narrow since the snow was blowing on the pavement, and I didn’t have much room to dodge. I gripped the wheel tighter.

As we went down the road, the salt spray coated the windshield. It seemed like I had to spray the windshield with cleaning spray every two or three miles. And the salt spray coated the headlights and the road grew darker and darker with each mile.

We approached Fairmont and there was a flare in the northbound lanes, the leftovers from an accident. Another mile – I asked Andy why all the flashing lights – “There is a big truck being pulled out of the ditch by an really big tow truck.”

We kept moving, trying to avoid the ridges of snow and ice on the road. I hate those ridges – when I lived in New Jersey I saw a car hit one one snowy night on the interstate – he was going the other way. His car hit the ridge of snow and it looked like something out of a high speed chase movie – the car’s left side spun upwards and the car became airborne, turning completely over in the air and sliding down the highway on the roof of the car, finally coming to a stop as another car hit the tail end hard in the side and sending the car spinning around a couple of times.

It cleared up – almost – for a few miles. Then, as we approached the six lane near Jerry Dove Drive, the snow on the road grew more intense, just as the traffic increased. Now, none of the lanes were clear – the roadway could not even be seen through the snow. Now, I was driving through the dark, with salt-covered headlights that were little more than marker lights on top of a snow-covered highway, ready to go into a spin at any moment.

I’ve experienced those spin-outs. Once, we went to Canton to retrieve some students that were flying in during a snowstorm and our van didn’t have much tread on the tires. Suddenly, I found myself going left, then right, then l-e-f-t all the way around and ended up in the medium strip in 8 inches of snow facing ongoing traffic. It was NOT a fun feeling. And that was during the daytime.

Now, I was passing Meadowbrook Road driving on an inch and a half of slushy, snow-and-ice with traffic beside me as I headed up the hill in the curve.

And then, I came up over the ridge at Route 50 and the people in front of me slammed on their brakes. I risked it and moved to the left quickly, crossing a ridge of snow and ice. A little left, a little right, but this time the tires caught and I went down the leftmost lane.

Five minutes later, we came to a stop at the bottom of the Quiet Dell exit. The long dark night of travel was over. I playfully spun out as I turned at the 7/11 and drove past the Bastins, and went into the lot. We were home!

I walked into the house, and there was my dear wife, warming dinner, and very relieved to see us safely home. She had been praying all the way.

Sometimes, it seems that our life is one long dark night of our soul, traveling down a slick, tricky road with tractor-trailers right beside us. Every mile you go, you wonder if you are going to be run over, go into a spin-out, slide off the highway, or end up in the ditch, needing to be towed out by God’s tow truck. And the only thing that seems to get you home are the prayers of those who love you.

We are entering the time of Lent, a period of time in the church calendar which is a 40-day time of preparation for the events of Holy Week. Our readings lead us toward Jerusalem, toward the teachings of Jesus in the Temple, and toward His sacrificial death on the cross which paid all the penalties which we have owed God for all the crimes we have committed against Him and His creatures. Today we start with Christ’s encounter with Satan during 40 days of testing in the wilderness for Jesus. Lent is often a dark time.

For we have all committed crimes against God. And those crimes – those sins – keep us away from God.

We have all disobeyed His commands to love Him and to love other people. In our lives we have harmed other people countless times through acts of violence, through words of violence, and through avoiding acts that would have helped others. We have disobeyed God in thought, word and deed.

Have you ever wished someone dead, even for a few seconds? Jesus points out that this is morally the same as killing them. Have you ever coveted something a friend has – a new car, a home, a new phone? This is morally the same as stealing. Have you ever desired a married woman or man you saw in person or in the movies? Jesus points out that your heart has committed adultery. God’s standards of behavior and moral goodness are very high – so high we cannot naturally achieve those standards. But let’s avoid God’s laws and look at human law.

Have you ever driven faster than the speed limit? If so, you have broken the law. You may not have been caught by the state police, but God’s ever-present all-seeing radar knows that you have broken that law, and that you are a lawbreaker.

And God knows that anyone who disobeys, anyone who is a lawbreaker, anyone who commits a crime and gets away with it will eventually commit a crime once again, and then another, and then another, each crime growing worse and worse as the criminal grows older. Can you imagine such a person after ten thousand years? Can you imagine their sneaky, cunning, conniving character?

God can – and does not want to associate with such a person. And so God tossed us out of the Garden of Eden when we became disobedient to God by eating the fruit, the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, and we were tossed out of the Garden so we could no longer eat of the fruit from the Tree of Eternal Life, and we began to die. We who were born after the Garden episode also commit these crimes and we are allowed to die, just as Adam and Eve died, so that we won’t live around God and become those warped and twisted, evil-natured creatures that ten thousand years of getting our own way would turn us into.

But God provided us with a way to turn around. As Jesus said, “Repent and believe the Good News!”

If we will turn around, if we will repent – the word literally means to “re-think” – if we will rethink our relationship with God and choose to follow God’s commands, and particularly follow the commands of His Son, Jesus Christ – He will give us eternal life. Our commitment to follow Jesus Christ is all that is necessary for God to forgive us and begin to work with us instead of against us. And when we take the extra step of showing action by becoming baptized, God reaches down, washes away all of our sin history, and changes our heart so we will desire to be good as we begin our eternal life with God.

Why should He do such a thing? For you know and God must know that within a day we will break another of God’s commands and we will once again be disobedient to God.

Because God also knows that there is a vast difference between not caring what God thinks of you and trying to follow the commands of God’s Son. If you are truly trying to follow Christ, to become like Christ, to do the things Jesus commanded, then those same ten thousand years that would have destroyed you and warped you and given you a heart of stone can now become ten thousand years where you can learn and practice and follow Christ more and more, becoming holy and good and angelic in your thoughts, your words, your soul.

Over the last few couple of years, I have heard stories from you of certain saints who used to attend this church, saints that now dance with Jesus. There are the stories told of Oma Witty, who was such a joy to be around, Grandmother Sandy, who had such wisdom, and the British-born Irene Upton, whose laughter was contagious. Such saints are dearly missed, but we will see them again one day.

Those saints did not develop those wonderful personalities overnight. And those who knew them best would say that they still had areas to work on. But they were on the road to a spiritual perfection that we rarely see, improving every year in their ability to walk as Jesus would walk.

Yet, there are also people in this world today who are not on that road at all, and there are still more who are stuck at rest stops along the highway – or even in the ditch. You may be stuck in the ditch. If so, then join us in Sunday School, in Anita’s midweek study, in the confirmation class, or the Sunday evening class to get you back on the highway and get you moving toward the spiritual perfection that is our goal. But today, let’s look at those who were completely off the road, or are not on the road at all.

I know of a man who was directly responsible for imprisoning men and women for no other crime except the crime of telling people that Jesus Christ was the Son of God. Some of these men and women were later executed for this so-called crime. And this man was directly responsible for dragging these men and women from their homes after they were denounced by others. He was a religious fanatic – absolutely dedicated to serving his God and would not tolerate the least bit of disagreement over who that God was. He lived in the Middle East. You may know of him also, for he became famous. His name was Saul of Tarsus – known to us as the Apostle Paul.

As we know, one day Paul was walking on the road to Damascus to find and persecute some more Christians, when a blinding light hit him and a voice spoke to him. “Who are you lord?” Paul asked, and the voice replied, “I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting.” Paul was taken to Damascus, received his sight back a few days later from a Christian who was scared to death of him, and began to preach that Jesus Christ was the Son of God. Paul repented – he re-thought his relationship with God.

A few years ago, there was another man who became famous. Jeffrey Dahmer was a serial killer and cannibal. He raped and murdered his 17 victims. Dahmer was finally arrested and put into prison.

A few months after his arrest, Dahmer asked for and received a Bible. After about two years,, Dahmer asked for and met with a Church of Christ pastor repeatedly. Eventually, Dahmer was baptized, continued to meet with the pastor weekly, and showed every sign of a complete conversion. Six months later, he was murdered in prison.

Today in the Middle East there are men who have decided that Christians are to be murdered, beheaded on public videos. And we wonder why the men of the so-called Islamic State do this. I will tell you, but it will not be the answer you may have thought.

I have pondered long and hard why the Islamic State has chosen the public executions that they have chosen. I first heard of these guys a couple of years ago when they were just another group fighting the Syrian government. They posted a video where one of their leaders took a Syrian prisoner, cut out his heart and ate it on camera. At this point I could see that this was true evil walking upon the earth.

Since then, they have massacred many of the Yazidi, the people of the mountain, who are an oddball religious sect who could actually be said to be Satan worshippers – or to be worshippers of a religion which is a mixture of Islam, Zorasterism, and look toward Enoch, one of the early patriarchs whom you will find in Genesis. Read the Wikipedia article on the Yazidi. It’s a strange religion, so, we think – “These ISIS guys are religious fanatics who only want Islam”.

Then, they murder several American and British journalists and we think “Oh, they don’t like the West – we’ve seen this before”, they consider us to be crusaders who have tried to control their countries, and we go on with our life.

But then they begin to do some different things. They murdered the Japanese and this is not normal, for the Japanese have never done anything to the people of the Middle East. Next, they burn the Jordanian pilot – a fellow Moslem – and the Jordanian air force strikes back.

And now, they have beheaded 21 Egyptian Christians in Libya. Why? Egyptians aren’t the hated Western enemy.

So they’ve killed by particularly brutal means some people that would be considered pagan, at least one Moslem who was fighting them, some Western Christians that they might consider “crusaders” – and Egyptian Christians. Why kill the Egyptians? Killing Christians is NOT part of the commands of Mohammed, except soldiers during warfare. And these were innocent workers, not soldiers.

And then I began to suspect the motives of the leadership.

Did you notice? Those 21 innocent Egyptians were each killed by a different man standing behind them. And while those innocent Christian martyrs – a Greek word which means “witnesses” - will be greeted by Jesus Christ and given beautiful white robes, hell has just begun for those executioners. They are the ones who truly need to be prayed for.

When a man or woman harms another man or woman, it harms their own soul. If you do something which you know deep in your heart is wrong, such as killing an innocent person or brutally harming another person, you will feel shame. And shame is a powerful way of maintaining control.

You see, those 21 executioners will now be loyal. They carry such shame at killing innocent men, that they will never again be able to associate with anyone outside of the Islamic State. They will follow any command, do anything they are asked to do. You see, in the Islamic State, they are greeted as heros. But anywhere else, people who find out who they are will greet them with horror. Because those men know what they have done is wrong in the sight of all gods, in all moral codes, they must put their hope in the so-called Islamic State and its assurances that if they continue the jihad, the struggle, that they will win paradise when they die in battle. It is the only hope they can see.

David, the writer of our Psalm wrote:

3 No one who hopes in you
will ever be put to shame,
but shame will come on those
who are treacherous without cause.

Shame. These men know shame. And outside of Christ’s love, they can never know forgiveness. There is nothing they can do to ever remove the damage that has been done to their souls – unless they come to know Jesus Christ and His Good News that God will forgive all.

And Christ is ready to forgive them. He forgave Saul of Tarsus. He has forgiven many other people who were guilty of terrible crimes throughout history. It is perhaps the core part of the Good News, that Jesus Christ and God will forgive you if you repent and decide to follow Him. God’s forgiveness rate is 100%.

What have you done in your life for which you feel shame? Here, in this place, we find forgiveness. You see, shame comes upon us when we feel that we have done something for which we will one day be punished, when we’ve done something that we personally feel is terrible, when we feel we have broken a moral code that we once swore never to break. We feel shame when we recognize that our moral code is lying in pieces around our feet, and when we feel shame, we see our personal image lying broken and stomped upon – by our own actions.

What have you done in your life for which you feel shame? We all experience this shame to one extent or another. The only people who have never experienced shame are the true sociopaths, the really scary people who have no moral code except “I want” and so it must be right, those who have hearts made not of stone but of inflexible steel. If you have a heart at all, it is a good thing when you say to yourself – or another – “I’m ashamed.”

Our shame affects us deeply. As we recognize our shame, there are two courses that we can take.

Some people attempt to work off their shame and guilt. These people work hard, killing themselves with hard work to try to pay for their crimes and guilt. They may do something directly for the people they’ve hurt – or they may simply try to become someone worthy. We saw this in the movie “Saving Private Ryan”. We find that the captain and the other men died to save Private Ryan, and he worked hard after the war so that their sacrifice would be “worth it.” Are you attempting to earn back the sacrifices someone made for you, perhaps a parent or a friend, to compensate them or someone else for all they once did for you which you did not appreciate at the time? Are you trying to pay back a debt that can never be repaid and you are ashamed that you cannot repay it? Perhaps you have outlived another person. Do you feel guilty that you are alive and they are not? Do you feel ashamed that they did good things for you and you feel that you did not do enough for them?

Other people go through the long dark night of the soul. They recognize their shame and a terrible sense of approaching punishment takes ahold of them. They retreat from the world into a darkness that is theirs to live in, a depression and sadness that comes when they believe their actions will naturally mean that they can have no joy in their world. The long dark night of the soul goes on for years, as they punish themselves for what they have done, and they cannot accept that joy should be part of their lives. Are you in that long dark night, punishing yourself, expecting at any minute to run off the highway of despair and it be the end of everything?

If you are ashamed of something you’ve done – or not done – in this life, then there is a three-step process for recovering from the shame. Perhaps you might want to bow your head.

First, admit the shame. Say to yourself and God “I’m ashamed of ….”and fill in the blank.

The second step is for you to apologize to God. “God, I’m sorry. I wish I hadn’t done it. Will you please forgive me?”

The third step, then, is to hear these words: “In the name of Jesus Christ, you are forgiven!” Take these words as the Holy Spirit speaking through me to you, for that is what these words are. You are truly forgiven by God. God loves you. Completely.

God forgave Paul of Tarsus of the terrible deeds he had done. Christ forgave Jeffrey Dahmer of the horrific deeds he did. And if they choose to come to Him, Jesus will forgive the men of the Islamic State for their deeds. But most importantly, God has forgiven you. God has forgiven you and welcomed you back into His arms. Christ will once again walk with you.

I’ve spent some time talking about how the victims of shame can break that control, how God’s forgiveness can set you free from that control. But I’d like to take just a minute to speak about leaders who would order the atrocities we’ve seen the Islamic State commit.

C.S.Lewis pointed out that when we see great evil, we must remember that the vast majority of the people involved in the evil are not evil themselves – they are just the greatest victims of the evil. Those Christians who are killed by the Islamic State die and go to Heaven, where they will meet with our first martyr, Christ Himself. – those who do the killing lose their souls. But what of those who set up the system?

Throughout history, we see that there is a great evil which moves from place to place around the world. Caligula, Nero, Attilla the Hun, more recently Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot in Cambodia, the initiators of the Rwandan genocide, the Yugoslavian genocides led by Slobadan Milosevic, and the evil in Uganda. Now, we see that the great evil is leading the Islamic State. It is at the top that the great evil persists, it is at the top that the lies about God and Christ are declared, it is at the top that the great deceiver works. The Bible tells us his name is Satan.

The demon that leads the Islamic State is moving us once again toward a great war. The attack on the Egyptian Christians has forced a response from the Egyptian president, a man who is not well liked by his countrymen, a man who teeters on the edge of being overthrown. Egypt is the prize, a country of a hundred million people, which can provide thousands of recruits for the Islamic State. Soon, you will hear the propaganda explaining why the Egyptian president is just a pawn in the back pocket of the “evil crusading West”, and then you will know that the troubles are upon us, when a new great war will be fought, the four horsemen will ride forth, and there will be war once again between the people of God on one hand – Christians and Jews – and the people who are led by hatred and shame on the other side, with many ordinary, peace-loving Moslems forced to make a difficult choice. And we will not escape being drawn into that war.

Pray, my friends. Pray as you have never prayed before that the evil be stopped now by God. Pray for our world and that the hearts of all men and women be changed to follow Jesus. Pray for Christ to return. Pray that God’s glory shine to everyone!

Over the next few weeks of Lent, those forty days – not counting Sundays – when we look inward to prepare ourselves for Christ – we will look inward. We don’t count Sundays because every Sunday is a celebration of the Resurrection, a miniature Easter celebration !

On Sunday afternoons at 2 pm, we will have the confirmation class, appropriate for anyone 12 years or older who wants to understand much deeper about what Christianity and the Methodist Church is all about. On Wednesday Evenings, at 6:30 Anita will be helping you get closer to God and be transformed through deep prayer – speaking to God and listening for God’s response through the Holy Spirit. Naturally, the Pioneer Clubs will continue. And on Sunday Evenings at 6 pm, we will be focused upon answering questions about how to share the Gospel with another and answer their questions about God, Jesus Christ, and Christianity.

Be forgiven – and leave the long dark night of the soul for the light and heavenly joy that comes with the love of Christ.

A Transformation of View

2 Kings 2:1-12; Psalm 50:1-6; 2 Corinthians 4:3-6; Mark 9:2-9

(Most of this sermon is available on video at http://youtu.be/ESxzZDBPPlc .)

As many of you know, we still have a house and property in Ohio, just north of Marietta on the Muskingum River. On those 2 and a quarter acres, a decade ago I planted about 80 fruit trees, mostly apple, but also with apricot, almond, pear, peaches, nectarines, cherries, plums, persimmons, and even a lonely prune tree. And in past years, this time of the year is when people who own orchards begin to spray. For if we do not spray, we do not have fruit.

The first spray, the spray that we make this time of the year is called “dormant oil”. Dormant oil is very simple – we simply take a form of vegetable oil and spray a dilute form of it over the trees. This oil then coats all of the egg cases of the damaging insects and the cocoons of all the moths and butterflies that would result in caterpillars and more eggs laid to turn into more caterpillars which would eat the leaves and flowers and fruit that was trying to grow, and that would infect the fruit with different diseases and rots. So we spray the trees with the oil so the eggs and the cocoons will suffocate. It is simple, environmentally friendly, and does little more than put a gallon of thinly spread vegetable oil over the orchard.

But it is amazing, isn’t it, those cocoons where the last surviving caterpillars of fall hibernate and slowly change over the winter. The biologists called it a “meta-morphesis”, which is from two Greek words that mean “ beyond” and “change”. So a metamorphosis is a “change beyond” the normal change. A morphosis is a normal change, like a puppy becoming a dog. But a metamorphosis goes beyond a normal change and turns a caterpillar into a butterfly.

Recent research has shown us what happens. We’ve all seen how the caterpillar forms a cocoon, a tough fibrous outer shell that protects the caterpillar from the cold, the snow, the rain, and most predators. The cocoon forms a snuggly little place where the caterpillar will be safe during the next few weeks or months. But it also forms a prison for the developing butterfly. If the butterfly cannot one day break through the cocoon, the butterfly will never fly.

Scientists have found out even more details about how the caterpillar changes in the cocoon. Most caterpillars are born with the normal digestive organs, a brain, etc. But caterpillars are also born with small organs called “imaginal discs”. Imaginal discs – from the same root as the word “imagine”.

These imaginal discs do very little in most caterpillars. But when the caterpillar is ready to make it’s cocoon, the tough outer coating that will protect it during the metamorphosis, some changes happen inside the caterpillar.

First of all, the caterpillar almost completely digests itself. It turns the inside of the caterpillar into a gooey substance that has no structure. It is just digested caterpillar. It has literally eaten itself. If you open the cocoon at this point, the goo just oozes out and the creature will die.

But the imaginal discs are NOT digested. Those little organs survive the digesting process and they begin to grow. Some turn into a new brain, some turn into wings, some turn into digestive organs, some turn into muscles, some turn into eyes. The use the gooey stuff as their food and use the old digested caterpillar goo to build the new creature.

Then, one day, when everything has been put back together the right way, the cocoon bursts open and a beautiful butterfly crawls out, sits for a few minutes in the sun, and then flies away!

In our Gospel reading today, Jesus has been doing his ministry in the lands north of Galilee, the area near Caesarea Phillipi. One day, he takes his core group of disciples – Peter, James, and John, up onto a high mountain – many people think it was Mount Hermon, which is a large mountain which is on the Lebanon-Syria border. The snow from Mount Hermon supplies the Sea of Galilee with water, which then becomes the Jordan River which flows into the Dead Sea. It is the northern part of what today we call the Golan Heights. Here on top of Mount Hermon, there were small temples which had been set up to Baal, to Greek and Roman gods and goddesses, and to other gods and goddesses. There was a long history of setting up temples and shelters for various deities and demi-gods here.

When the small party reaches the top of the mountain, something extraordinary happens. Jesus changes His appearance. He is no longer a tired man who has just climbed several thousand feet – the peak is over nine thousand feet above sea level. No, Jesus suddenly is wearing dazzling white clothing – “whiter than anyone can bleach them”. He has changed – His divinity is showing through.

Elijah and Moses are talking with Him. Elijah, who was taken to Heaven in a whirlwind after a chariot of fire and horses of fire appeared is there. Moses, whose body was never found, is there. As far as anyone can tell from the Old Testament scriptures, these two men never died, but were taken to Heaven while alive. And Peter, James, and John are watching all this happen. What would you do? What would you think? What would you say?

It’s all too much for Peter. Peter, the man of action, simply cannot contain himself and watch. 5 Peter said to Jesus, “Rabbi, it is good for us to be here. Let us put up three shelters—one for you, one for Moses and one for Elijah.”

Peter wanted to honor Jesus. He wanted to put him “up there” with Moses and Elijah, two of the greatest prophets in Jewish history. But Peter wasn’t quite there. Peter didn’t quite grasp who Jesus was. Peter thought that he would do like so many other people had done and build a shrine on Mount Hermon. And Peter was about to go down in history as the first man whom God had told to “shut up”!

7 Then a cloud appeared and covered them, and a voice came from the cloud:“This is my Son, whom I love. Listen to him!”

Imagine the embarrassment for Peter when God tells him, in essence – “Don’t insult Jesus by comparing Him to Moses and Elijah – This is my SON. Now shut up and “Listen to Him!”

I suspect that there was a new respect for their rabbi that day as the three disciples came down off the mountain.

On the mountain, Jesus was transfigured. His appearance changed – and He changed. For just a few minutes, the disciples saw the beautiful God-man that was locked inside the human body. For just a few minutes, the disciples had a glimpse of Who they were walking beside and talking with every day. For just a few minutes, the disciples were shaken to the depths of their hearts by their encounters with God the Father and God the Son.

In the beginning of the Lord of the Rings books and movie, the kindly wizard Gandolf comes to Hobbiton, a quiet village where he is known as the gentle old, perhaps slightly doty man who can make fireworks. But later on in the first book, in the first movie, there is an episode where this kindly old wizard is face to face with a great evil demon. Suddenly, we find out the hidden power and strength in the old man. Suddenly, we find out that this man who was simply known for making fireworks can also stand up to the greatest evil the party has encountered and say, like a prophet of old: “You shall not pass”. And suddenly, we see that hidden within the wrinkled human body is a tremendous power for good.

Peter and the other disciples also had looked at Jesus and said to themselves, “He’s a lot like me.” They thought he was a really good teacher, a man who knew a great deal about scripture, and who somehow could perform healing miracles. But they had not realized the depth of the difference between them. They, who had looked up their entire lives to the stories of Moses at the Red Sea and Elijah fighting the battle of the gods on top of Mount Carmel, they had been excited to put Jesus into that same class of man, sort of like we might take a particularly good politician and say that he is like John F Kennedy or Abraham Lincoln.

But God the Father would have none of this. Just for a few moments, the divine nature of Jesus came forth and he shone with the pure white crisp brilliance of Heaven. Just once, God the Father spoke to Peter and told Peter in no uncertain words that Jesus was far more than Moses, far more than Elijah, far more than any mere human who had ever walked on the planet. And just for once, we see part of what led Peter and the others to spend the rest of their lives telling people about Jesus Christ, the Son of God. The transfiguration was the defining moment in the relationship of Jesus to those three disciples. It was the moment when they realized that they had been walking around with God Himself every day – and that shocked them to the very core of their hearts.

For you see, Peter, James, and John were also transformed that day. Except for a brief vacation after the Resurrection, these three fishermen no longer fished on the Sea of Galilee. Peter traveled to Babylon and Rome spreading the Gospel of Christ. John traveled to western Turkey and led the growing church in Ephesus until his exile on the island of Patmos in the Aegean Sea. James was killed in Jerusalem by King Herod. They all lived – and died – spreading the Good News of Christ.

The effect upon the disciples reminds me of the day when Saundra and I had spent an hour after church explaining to two of our dear International Students from China who Jesus was. I mentioned that we had writings that indicated that over 500 people had witnessed the resurrected Christ, and one of the girls looked up in shock and said, “So, it is TRUE?!?” You could almost see her world spin around as she realized that what she had believed for her entire life was shaken by this new fact.

And what about us?

The Transfiguration changed Jesus by showing His divine nature. Much as a caterpillar turns into a butterfly, Jesus showed the three disciples what was inside His human skin. And later, when He arose from the dead, He was changed again. He walked about in a new, glorified body, new to the world, changed enough that His disciples and followers did not recognize Him at first.

And we, too, are to be changed by the Transfiguration. We are to be transformed. When we recognize that Jesus truly is God’s Son and to be listened to, we are transformed. Inside us, God has put the seeds of imagination, those soul-seeds that allow us to be transformed as we hear the Word of Christ, the Word of God, the gentle voice of the Holy Spirit.

Yet, just like the caterpillar, we must let our old self die away and be consumed. Consumed, yet not forgotten, for it is out of our recognition and repudiation of our sin, our desire to change from our sin nature into something desired by God, that we can grow into a beautiful person, led by our imagination and the transforming acts of the Holy Spirit of God.

When we live in the world, the world beats us up. Eventually, it is easy to retreat into a cocoon, to hide from the world under our bed, to curl up at home and stay away from those things that might hurt us. Our spirit melts down, we move less and less, and finally, our spirit becomes a messy, human goo that is vulnerable and may never come out of the cocoon in which we’ve placed ourselves. We may withdraw from the world, never to return.

But if we take this time to read the Word of God, to pray to our Creator, to listen to the Holy Spirit, something miraculous can happen. If we take time to contemplate the life, teachings, and sacrifice of Jesus Christ, then something wonderful can happen to us. If we invite the Holy Spirit to take over from our old self-spirit, a new Spirit will begin to come together within us as the thoughts and imaginations and dreams that the Holy Spirit gives us grow together in our mind. This is the transformation that Anita’s new Wednesday evening class hopes to generate. I hope you’ll consider coming to the transformation time at 6:30 each Wednesday.

As our old self-spirit melts down and becomes human goo, our new spirit, guided by the Holy Spirit can grow and become something wonderful, something beautiful, something that can fly far above what our old caterpillar-self could ever hope to venture to, bound down as it was by the weight of sin and self-destruction.

Use your imagination, guided by the Holy Spirit. We are told that we are to become Christ-like in all ways we can. When we die, we will receive at our Resurrection a glorified body just as Christ was. But before we die, how will we be transformed? How can we who have darkness in our lives become brightly shining like Jesus was at the transfiguration?

As Paul wrote in 2 Corinthians 4:

6 … God, who said, “Let light shine out of darkness,” made his light shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of God’s glory…

Take the story of the Transfiguration inside yourself. Let it do its work, digesting your old view of Jesus as a wise teacher, destroying your old view that this world around us is what counts, eliminating the limitations on your old view that keep you tied down to what ordinary men and women can do.

Perhaps you have been walking around in this world for years since you came to know Jesus. Perhaps it has been decades since your baptism and you, like a caterpillar, have been walking around, eating the leaves of the Word of God for many years. Perhaps you have been earth-bound, held down by your awareness that you are just a caterpillar, and that caterpillars never fly.

But instead, like the caterpillar’s imaginal discs, let the seeds of imagination, guided by the Holy Spirit, remake you into something beautiful. The Holy Spirit, which is now in your heart, will make the light of the knowledge of God’s glory shine from your heart into your new life.

Consider what heights you can soar to if you are lifted up by Holy God, the Creator of the Universe. Consider the evil that you and God together can destroy. Consider the good that you and God together can do. Consider a complete metamorphoses that can happen if you will let your imagination follow the leading of God’s Word, Christ’s sacrifice, and the Holy Spirit’s gentle voice.

The Spirit may be speaking to you now. What are you to do? Is there a barrier in your way? Could you ask God to remove it? The butterfly must first make its way through the tough protective coating that surrounds the cocoon before it can fly. Remember, the cocoon is safe and protective for the caterpillar – but if the butterfly does not break out of the cocoon it will die. Ask God for help breaking through your cocoon.

· Is your cocoon made of safe, long-established habits? Ask God to cut through your old habits. Hold onto the Creator as you become a new creation.

· Is your cocoon the cocoon of feeling like you don’t know the answers? Ask God to give you the education and knowledge you need, and the answers you need. God knows all things and can show you all things.

· Is your cocoon the cocoon of thinking you are too old? Ask God to show you how to be young again in your spirit. After all, you have tens of thousands of years still to live, my eternal friend. Begin again today.

· Is your cocoon the cocoon of thinking that you are too young or too small to make a difference? Ask God to make a way for you. Ask God to use God’s ultimate, Universe-building power to make a difference and change the world through you.

· Is your cocoon the cocoon of can’t, shouldn’t, don’t wanna? Ask God to show you how to break past those old cords that mind you down. Ask God to DO, and ask God to bring you along in the journey.

What is your cocoon called? What do you need God’s help breaking free of?

In Romans, Paul also wrote: “If God is for us, who can be against us?”

It is time to break out of your cocoon, your place of safety, your prison of protection, your binding that holds you in one place. It is time to fly with the Holy Spirit of God. Stop looking at the world through caterpillar eyes and look through the eyes given to you by God, the God that wants you to fly!

If you are ready to drop behind the things that have held you back, whether it be what someone once told you, or what someone once did to you, or what you have limited yourself to – Come forward to the altar during our song today. Do not let your exceptions define you, do not lot those exceptions hold you back. Too often we have dreamed great and wonderful dreams that will honor God and we let the human perceptions stop us. YOU KNOW those exceptions – we’d like to do something wonderful and would – except for our finance, or except for our lack of skills, or except for our lack of knowledge.

As my son Andrew said last week, we are not called to be people of exceptions, but we are called to be an exceptional people.

Consider the caterpillar. We all begin life that way, bound to the earth around us. But Christians are not to be caterpillars. After we encounter Christ, we are to be butterflies. What could you look like to God? Look at this video for some ideas. (Skip ahead to the 0.55 point.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l16UMy8BhuY

We are to be butterflies, transformed into a new creation, flying toward God’s Son, free to do what is right and good and wholesome for us – and for everyone we meet. This is the essential difference between us and the world. We have the transfiguring power of God speaking to us daily through God’s Word and the Holy Spirit. Listen and be changed!

Break free today. Come to the altar during our song. Speak to God and ask for the Holy Spirit to guide you as you throw off your cocoon. Talk with the Creator who made you and ask Him how to become a butterfly. Kneel before the One who loves you and died so that you could be free from your bonds. Come to the altar during our song.

Consider the words of the Hymn of Promise https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vljO26OhOXQ .