Read
Hebrew
4:14-16
This following Jesus stuff is pretty
simple, even a child can do it. God
loves you. Love one another. How much
more can there be?
Love is a big-ticket item for
sure. Loving God and each other is the
command that Jesus said all
law and prophecy was anchored upon.
He went on to raise the bar for his disciples saying that we
are to love each other as much as he loved us. The old standard was to love your neighbor as much
as you loved yourself, but now we are to love each other as much as Christ
loves us. Christ loved us unto death, even
death on a cross.
We know love to be extremely important
for through it we fulfill
the law. How much more can there be?
There is, of course, living by faith
not by sight. You know, trusting
in the Lord with all your heart and leaning not on your own understanding. We should live
by faith. We know faith to be the
substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things not seen.
And certainly, we should live in obedience
to God. We know what God says by
his word and by the Spirit
that lives within us. Obedience
is a tough word for Americans. We were born
in rebellion and even included provisions in our Constitution to discard
our own government if it no longer represented us. But come Sunday, we sing
Trust and Obey
for there’s no other way.
Okay, so we love and trust and obey and
have faith. I guess that’s not too much.
Then there’s living in the truth, walking
in the truth if we use John’s words.
The
truth will set you free if we just stick to what Jesus had to say.
Let’s not forget hope. Where would we be without hope. Those
who hope in the Lord will renew their strength. Besides, we have already talked about faith
and love and we need hope to fill our Paul’s thirteenth
verse of his thirteenth chapter in his first letter to Corinth. Faith, hope, love, abide these three but the
greatest of these is love.
That about covers it, except for
rest. We all need rest. We all need Sabbath
rest. Jesus
beckons all
who are weary and heavy laden to come to him and he will give us rest. Our
rest lies in Jesus himself.
We get more
on resting in the Lord in the part of this morning’s chapter that precedes
what I read.
And if we continue what Jesus had to
say, we all need a teachable spirit.
Take my yoke and learn from me. My
yoke is easy and my burden is light.
And since we are talking
about burdens, every person is to carry
his own load, unless
he needs help then we should help him.
I thought about doing a solo special and sing He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My
Brother, then I remembered that our insurance is void if I come within 5
feet of the choir microphone for fear that people will be injured rushing the
exits.
Usually when I use this little bit of
levity, I get a few laughs but I also get a few nods of affirmation.
That about wraps it up except for
peace. Where would we be without peace
in this troubled world. The world tells
us that we can only have peace
after we finish the two-thousand-piece puzzle of the snow-covered
landscape. We can’t have peace
until we solve all of our problems, pay all of our bills, and finish the
puzzle.
God grants us a peace
that goes beyond our understanding.
For those who know this peace
, it is something that you never want to be without again.
Oh, and there is thanksgiving
and gratefulness. These lead to our giving and generosity and
are tied
to our peace, and that surely wraps up the list of what it takes to follow
Jesus.
Unless we go back to love and remember
that we are people of love
in action. Love is not
some amorphous concept, love compels us to action. Of course, faith compels us to action. Faith
without works is dead. Faith and
works work together.
We haven’t even touched on redemption
and salvation
and renewal. And I will not cover everything we should be
doing in what seems like a gallimaufry—now there’s a word for you that means hodgepodge,
jumble or confused medley—of things we need to do to follow Jesus.
But we know that God is a God
of order and not disorder so there must be order in what appears to be a
compendium of related directions and guidelines.
Maybe I should stop there and let you
take a week to try to put a taxonomy or hierarchy to all of these
directions. Love, action, trust,
obedience, faith, hope, peace, rest, compassion, forgiveness, to get you
started. More will come to mind once you
begin.
We should need psychiatric help trying
to keep up with all of those, but instead of going bonkers, we have
confidence. Our minds should be spinning
out of control but we have confidence.
Confidence in
what?
In God’s mercy and his grace. When we are running our race of faith and we make
a wrong turn, we are told to approach God’s throne of grace with
confidence.
When we miss the mark, we are told
to confess. We don’t do this
wondering if this time I went too far.
We approach his throne of grace with confidence—with confidence.
God does
not want to kick us to the curb, send us to hell, or give us a life in
which he is not part of anymore. God
loves us. He has forgiven us. We are his and he wants
us to come home when we stray.
If you read Luke
15, you find three stories about lost and found and the joy of being found
after being once lost. Heaven rejoices
when the lost come home. Heaven rejoices
when we who know God through Jesus but somehow wandered off, come home.
This coming home stuff is a big deal
even if he has to go looking for us first.
It’s a big deal!
You are sons and daughters of the
King. You are brothers
and sisters of
Christ. You
are called friend. You were fearfully
and wonderfully made. You are called
to be a Royal
Priesthood. You
are chosen. This is a big deal.
We may and will do things that we know
do not please God but God is always pleased when we come home. Unlike the Prodigal
Son, we must come home with confidence.
We come with confidence from wherever it is that we regain our senses.
We can be penitent and confident at
the same time. We long to leave our
sinful ways behind us and know that we have a Father in heaven who rejoices when
we come back to him and seek his will above all else.
We should never come before God’s
throne of grace doubting that he will be faithful
and just to forgive.
Our caution is that we must
not make God out to be a liar. This
is where we run astray. This is where we
don’t have peace. Sin is sin and the
world doesn’t get to vote on that.
Most of us understand this. Most of us have not succumbed to the thinking
of the world but the world wants the final say on what is sin and what isn’t
and if the truth be known, there is not much that the world wants to call sin
anymore.
I like to put it this way. We
are people of whosoever will not whatsoever goes.
So how do we help people with the whosoever
will part in this whatsoever
goes world? I should just leave
that as a take home essay assignment. Ten
pages, double-spaced, twelve font with bibliography should do the trick.
How do we help people move from
whatsoever goes to whosoever will? We
must introduce them to the God
of mercy and grace that we know.
We don’t condemn people. The
Law will do that. The law will show
the futility of their thinking and their living. So let the law condemn and the Spirit
convict so we are free to fulfill
our commission.
Our part is to convey that once you
repent of your worldly lifestyle and receive Jesus, you will not only come to
know this God of love but will approach his throne of grace with confidence.
The world has mantras for the
way it lives. Heaven won’t take
me and hell is afraid I’ll take over.
It sounds cool but it’s not true.
It is sometimes just enough to keep some people from seeking the truth
and living in rebellion against God who is full of mercy. So many people who have rejected God are
afraid that they are too far gone.
It’s sort of like Star Wars and
embracing the dark side.
Fight or
flight is what the world tells them.
Stand and fight for what you believe even if you know in your heart that
it’s wrong. Once you have made a stand
for what you believe, then not only do you have an intellectual investment in
your position, now you are emotionally tied to it. You are anchored to it.
If you don’t fight, then run away and
crawl in a hole. Usually this is not a
physical hole. Depression works well and sometimes leads to suicide but always
reduces the quality of life—life
that God gave us to live to
the full.
Retreating from life itself is
flight. We are made to fully live and
anything sort of thing that involves running the other way is flight. And of course, there is the passive-aggressive
combination of the two. Retreat in
public and fight in private. This is
what I should have said. Today those
comments can be posted on Facebook from the perceived safety of your home.
Fight or flight sounds official. According to the world, it is.
But there is a third option. It is forgiveness. God is full of forgiveness. He is a God of mercy and grace and he longs
for all of his children to come home.
Seeking his forgiveness
should be preceded
by repentance.
Once someone comes home, he can come
to that throne of grace again and again and do it with confidence, without
doubt that the One who sits on it is faithful and just to forgive.
So, for those of us who
know God through his Son, let’s not comfort people who live in sin by
saying, that’s okay. It’s not okay but
trying to comfort them with those words might be worse than doing nothing or
offending them with the truth for we
become a stumbling
block
for
them to receive the grace of God.
We do not need to be—in fact we must
not be condemning—but we must speak
the truth in a spirit of love with the heart of the message being we serve
a God of love who is full of mercy and grace.
Did you know that this is a sign of our Christian
maturity?
Our focus is not the sin
of others. Our focus is calling
all to come before God and receive his mercy and his grace, and to know
once you have done this, we can come before him with confidence.
It’s hard to come before him with
confidence until
we come in repentance seeking his promise of life. Once we have done that, we know he is a
loving Father who delights in mercy and wants us to know his grace.
Why
would we want to deny anyone grace by telling them that sin is not sin?
We come before God confidently to
receive his mercy and grace.
So here is the dichotomy: Denial or
confidence.
We can deny our sin is sin or we can
be confident that God will be merciful.
Let’s not comfort people in their sin by saying, it’s not sin anymore.
Let’s comfort people that we serve a
God of love who is full of mercy and grace and he is waiting on them to come
home to him.
Let us then
approach God’s throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy
and find grace to help us in our time of need.
Let us lead people who do not know
God’s rest and peace to this same throne of grace so they too may come with
confidence all the days of their lives.
This following Jesus stuff is pretty
easy, even a child can do it. We must
come as a child, trusting fully in our heavenly Father that he will always love
us and always forgive us.
Don’t we want everyone to know this
special relationship that we have.
God loves us. We are to love one another. At the top of that love one another list
needs to be calling people to come home to their heavenly Father through Christ
Jesus—calling them to receive his mercy and grace.
Come home.
Amen.
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