Praise the Lord for
this Veterans Day that is observed in America the Beautiful. Praise the Lord
for the brave and gallant men and women who have fought for freedom and have
made the ultimate sacrifice. I had breakfast and lunch with two veterans
yesterday and today. They shared their deep love for this great country and
great nation.
The
Lord blessed us with a warm and summery day today. Alice has started decorating
the house for Christmas. She has started putting up her collection of Christmas
trees and donning the Christmas quilts. Soon the house will be transformed into
a Christmas House. She has started listening to all Christmas music and has
been watching all Christmas movies. Praise the Lord that we are privileged to
celebrate the birth of our Lord once again. It has been such a warm day that we
saw dandelions and forsythias, and roses in full bloom. We walked almost 4
miles this evening at sunset, and then under the majestic and starry sky.
Praise the Lord for the splendor and the wonder of His brilliant creation. The
Lord is on the move around the corner and around the world.
It was
25 years ago this month that the Berlin Wall fell. The Alquaeda and the ISIS of
old Communist Russia came unraveling without any bullet ... without any weapons
of mass destruction. It was the Lord God who sits upon the throne who blew the
powers of darkness and oppression away. He is fermenting His Church around the
corner and around the world. He calls us rise up and join Him in His divine
enterprise.
One of
the most famous sermons ever preached was the sermon by Jonathan Edwards
entitled, "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God." It is a remarkable sermon,
designed to stir a complacent congregation. In it Edwards warns his audience
that they are in danger of being cast into Hell at any moment. "Your wickedness
makes you as it were heavy as lead, and to tend downwards with great weight and
pressure towards hell," Edwards says, "and if God should let you go, you would
immediately sink and swiftly descend and plunge into bottomless gulf, and your
healthy constitution, and your own care and prudence, and best contrivance, and
all your righteousness, would have no more influence to uphold you and keep you
out of hell, than a spider's web would have to stop a falling rock." The
picture Edwards paints is not a pretty one. "Were it not for the sovereign
pleasure of God, the earth would not bear you one moment; for you are a burden
to it …."
In the
face of world calamities and deadly dangers we have a Savior and Lord who is
compassionate and merciful. The Psalmist tells us that although God's wrath is
real, it is not quickly stirred. He is "slow to wrath." But more than that,
the Psalmist says God is "rich in love." This is the committed love of God that
compels him to keep his promises even when we do not keep ours. It is faithful
love that is often expressed in the form of a covenant. Amazingly, it is an
attribute of God's faithfulness that is often emphasized in contexts where God's
people have been unfaithful.
In
Exodus
33,
after Israel has committed the great sin of worshiping the golden calf, Moses
asked God to show him his glory. The Lord said to Moses, "I will cause all my
goodness to pass in front of you, and I will proclaim my name, the Lord, in your
presence. I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy, and I will have
compassion on whom I will have compassion. But," he said, "you cannot see my
face, for no one may see me and live." The Lord hid Moses in a cleft in a rock
and covered him with his hand. Then, according to Exodus
34:6-7, as the Lord passed in front of Moses, he
proclaimed, "The Lord, the Lord, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to
anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands, and
forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin. Yet he does not leave the guilty
unpunished; he punishes the children and their children for the sin of the
fathers to the third and fourth generation."
Like
Moses we, too, come to see God's glory—not directly but indirectly. We see his
grace in sharp contrast to our sin. We see his patience displayed in stark
relief over and against our impatience. We see his compassion in contrast to
our self-centeredness and narcissism. We awake in the morning feeling a sense
of cold indifference toward him, yet he demonstrates his unfailing love in
unexpected and undeserved ways all day long. It is not a pretty lesson, at
least in what it reveals to us about ourselves, but it is a necessary
one.
We
praise the Lord because he has not dealt with us as our sins deserved.: "The
Lord is good to all; he has compassion on all he has
made." "All you have made will praise you, O Lord; your
saints will extol you. They will tell of the glory of your kingdom and speak of
your might, so that all men may know of your mighty acts and the glorious
splendor of your kingdom." God is at work in the world today: "Your kingdom is
an everlasting kingdom, and your dominion endures through all generations." The
idea of "God's kingdom" is one we find in the New Testament as well. It is
important that we recognize that it has both a narrow and a broad sense. We
wait for the kingdom in the narrow sense as we wait for Jesus Christ to come
back and reign from Jerusalem. We are waiting for a literal kingdom that can
only be ushered in by the return of Jesus Christ. There is also a kingdom in a
broader sense. That is the sense we mean whenever we pray the words of the
Lord's Prayer: "Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in
heaven."
In the
waning days of the Nazi terror, as allied bombs rained down on the shattered
city of Stuttgart, Lutheran pastor Helmut Thielicke preached a remarkable series
of sermons based on the Lord's Prayer. One of his most powerful — his sermon on
the petition "Thy Kingdom come" — was interrupted by an air raid. After the
bombs had fallen, Thielicke had to finish the sermon at a nearby school because
his own church lay in ruins. In that sermon Thielicke describes a moment of
discouragement, when all he had done for God seemed to have gone to pieces. His
flock was scattered, and he was utterly desolate. As he looked down into the
concrete pit of a cellar in which fifty young people had been killed by a bomb
blast, a woman approached him. "My husband died down there," she said. "His
place was right under the hole. T he clean-up squad was unable to find a trace
of him; all that was left was his cap. We were there the last time you preached
in that cathedral church. And here before this pit, I want to thank you for
preparing him for eternity."
"In
this world of death," Thielicke says in his sermon, "in this empire of ruins and
shell torn fields, we pray: 'Thy Kingdom come!' We pray it more than
ever."
In
Christ,
Brown
No comments:
Post a Comment