Sermon Cloud

Yesterday I read these words in The Letters of Samuel Rutherford “whether God come to his children with a rod or a crown, if he come himself with it, it is well.  Welcome, welcome Jesus, what way soever thou come, if we can get a sight of thee.”  We need a “sight of Jesus” or better yet we need eyes to see that Jesus is really here. 

John 14:15-24 (ESV)
¹⁵ “If you love me, you will keep my commandments. ¹⁶ And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Helper, to be with you forever, ¹⁷ even the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him. You know him, for he dwells with you and will be in you. ¹⁸ “I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you. ¹⁹ Yet a little while and the world will see me no more, but you will see me. Because I live, you also will live. ²⁰ In that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you. ²¹ Whoever has my commandments and keeps them, he it is who loves me. And he who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I will love him and manifest myself to him.” ²² Judas (not Iscariot) said to him, “Lord, how is it that you will manifest yourself to us, and not to the world?” ²³ Jesus answered him, “If anyone loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him. ²⁴ Whoever does not love me does not keep my words. And the word that you hear is not mine but the Father’s who sent me.^[1]

What we need help with is seeing.  I said last week and the week before, God commune with you according to the gifts he has given you.  We all need to catch sight of God and the first place we look is to his word.  Jesus tells us in our passage from John that the condition for communion with God the Father and with the Son through the Spirit is that we keep his word.  Whatever else he may give us and, we will talk more about that, nothing supersedes the word.  If we believe we can have all the desires this world offers us and have communion with God we are mistaken.  That is our first order of business:  Love God with our lives.  Then we will see what he opens to our gaze and how he makes his home in us.  Notice it here in the Lord’s proclamation to Isaiah:

Isaiah 44:21-28 (ESV)
²¹ Remember these things,

O Jacob, and Israel, for you are my servant;

I formed you; you are my servant;

O Israel, you will not be forgotten by me.

²² I have blotted out your transgressions like a cloud and your sins like mist;

return to me, for I have redeemed you.

²³ Sing, O heavens, for the Lord has done it;

shout, O depths of the earth;

break forth into singing, O mountains,

O forest, and every tree in it!

For the Lord has redeemed Jacob, and will be glorified in Israel.

²⁴ Thus says the Lord, your Redeemer, who formed you from the womb:

“I am the Lord, who made all things,

who alone stretched out the heavens,

who spread out the earth by myself,

²⁵ who frustrates the signs of liars and makes fools of diviners,

who turns wise men back and makes their knowledge foolish,

²⁶ who confirms the word of his servant

and fulfills the counsel of his messengers,

who says of Jerusalem, ‘She shall be inhabited,’

and of the cities of Judah, ‘They shall be built, and I will raise up their ruins’;

 Since we are the Church, baptized in the Holy Spirit, given divine gifts, anointed for service, called into the communion of the Father’s love, we should worship God in awe of who He is and what He has done.  Isaiah calls on the heavens and the Earth to sing His praises, every deep place, every mountain, every tree.  All those things He has created cry out to the Creator.  He stretched out the heavens like a canvas and painted it.  He molded the Earth in his hands and colored it in.  We indeed are to see these things.  We are to hear the wordless words of all that is made and with them return praise to the One who spoke them into being along with us.  We are formed by Him to see these things and only our own rebellion and sin can kill their voices.  Yes, some of us see them more clearly than others.  Some are gifted to reflect the glory again through lesser creations.  Artists, musicians, writers, poets, speakers, designers, builders, inventors, some of them redeemed, some of them not, are given the ability to see and express. The image of God dwells in all of mankind and expresses itself anytime genuine truth and beauty are displayed.  His kingdom breaks through in many places in creation and in human creativity. There is also brokenness now however in both creation and human endeavor.  Paul tells us the creation was subjected to futility, groaning until we are redeemed.  Some of the way this expresses itself is in death and its cycle.  Natural disasters are also representations of it.  Things in creation are not what they were supposed to be.  This has great implications for applied philosophy and science.  The biblical view is that both nature and humanity are fallen.  Both secular philosophy and science start with the supposition that what is is what has always been.  The end results or conclusions drawn reflect that beginning place.

 God is able to establish his kingdom.  In fact he has not ceased to reign.  He gives tremendous freedom in this age to oppose his will.  However, we will find in the end, while we don’t call evil good, his kingdom will swallow up evil and bring glory to the Triune God in the doing of it.  Many of the most famous artists of the last century have a darkness in their works that reflected this falleness.  Many of them were brilliant at capturing emotion, light, darkness, despair, gloom, joy, etc.   

 Something John White said in a book has stuck with me.  He said that all power is divine power.  God has all power.  Christ is granted all authority in heaven and on earth.  Even the adversary’s power is derived, stolen power.  In the end it will still rebound to the glory of God’s justice.  One illustration he used was great.  Moses throws down his staff and it becomes as snake in Pharaoh’s court.  Then Pharaoh’s magicians do the same.  They had power but God trumped it.  Moses’ snake swallowed their snakes and then became a staff again.

 One thing we should remember, even while we struggle to communicate, struggle to speak the truth in a society that is rejecting it, or struggle to live our lives according to the mercy we have received.  God is at work here.  He still has a plan and He is carrying it out.  We should not fear to participate to redeem not only people but also culture, to let the light shine in art, music, building, healing, justice, government, our home, and our work.  We are a reflection of his glory.  This will require communion with the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.  It will mean we must take his word seriously in all parts of our lives.  It will mean that we will have God himself make his home in us.  It is a splendid thing set before us as his people.  A group the size of this congregation here, when filled with the Spirit, turned the world upside down.  But we fear.  We fear to speak our visions, our dreams.  We fear the ridicule of the society around us.  We fear getting to close to that place of communion.  We fear we may be rejected by people or even by God.  These fears are not baseless.  The path to and from communion with God is filled with risk.  But if we are unwilling to risk, what will we receive?  How many will face him like the man who buried his one talent? 

  Hebrews 12:18-24 (ESV)
¹⁸ For you have not come to what may be touched, a blazing fire and darkness and gloom and a tempest ¹⁹ and the sound of a trumpet and a voice whose words made the hearers beg that no further messages be spoken to them. ²⁰ For they could not endure the order that was given, “If even a beast touches the mountain, it shall be stoned.” ²¹ Indeed, so terrifying was the sight that Moses said, “I tremble with fear.” ²² But you have come to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to innumerable angels in festal gathering, ²³ and to the assembly of the firstborn who are enrolled in heaven, and to God, the judge of all, and to the spirits of the righteous made perfect, ²⁴ and to Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood that speaks a better word than the blood of Abel.

 We have a new covenant.  We have an everlasting kingdom.  Not just someday in heaven, we have it now.  We will be persecuted and most often the persecution will come from within the church.  Jesus warned us that in these last days people will kill us and think they are doing God a favor.  (John 16:2)  But we should not fear.  This week a young man waited on Karla and I at Friday’s.  He had something written on the back of his shirt that I could not make out.  Then I realized it was Hebrew.  When he came back to the table I told him I liked the Hebrew on his shirt and asked him what it meant.  He said that it was part of a verse from Jeremiah and the words were “Dread Champion” in one modern version.  The ESV renders it this way:

 Jeremiah 20:11 (ESV)
¹¹ But the Lord is with me as a dread warrior; therefore my persecutors will stumble; they will not overcome me. They will be greatly shamed, for they will not succeed. Their eternal dishonor will never be forgotten.

 We have a champion.  We have received a covenant.  We are being given a kingdom and the Lord of all that is delights in us and wishes to make his home in us.  What do we have to fear?

[1]  The Holy Bible : English standard version. 2001. Wheaton: Standard Bible Society.