Sermon Video - An undeliverable message, Isaiah 6:1-13

Communication in the modern world is easy. We can talk, text, e-mail, video chat, any who knows what else with just about anyone in the world anytime we want. The process of delivering a message has never been easier, but one requirement is still needed: a willing recipient. When God called Isaiah to be a prophet he gave him a message that he knew would not be received by the Covenant people to whom Isaiah was charged with delivering it. Isaiah received his vision in 740 BC; The Assyrian army was not outside the walls besieging Jerusalem until 39 years later. There was time for repentance and revival, but there wasn’t a willing heart.


We often equate Isaiah’s “Here I am, send me” with foreign missions, with those willing to leave home to go and take the Gospel to people who have never heard it before. Isaiah’s task was much different, and in most ways much harder. He was sent to warn his own people, his own family, friends, neighbors, and fellow Jews. These were people who knew who God was, they knew God’s power, and they knew the consequences for disregarding their obligations under the Law of Moses. Their problem was not of the head, it was of the heart. They knew what was required but instead following God with their whole hearts their only did so on the surface. Isaiah was not a missionary, he was a reformer, a far different task.

It doesn’t matter if the people had closed their own eyes, ears, and hearts to God’s call or if God had done so to them in judgment. If it was their own choice, they had no excuse; if God had utilized his prerogative as holy judge and the author of the covenant, he had every right to do so. God was the injured party in this relationship, the cheated on spouse in this marriage. That God was willing to send prophets to try to save at least some of his people, until the very last moment before the long predicted judgment arrived, demonstrates the love that God had for his people. To disregard the Law of God is a very serious thing for his people, it has consequences that cannot be disregarded.

Thus we see another step on the road to the cross through the words of Isaiah. God’s people, a people who knew better, would not listen to his call to repent. The only way this cycle of disobedience, warning, and wrath could be broken would be if God himself came to take the weight of that righteous anger upon himself once and for all.

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Sermon Video: The System is Broken - Isaiah 1:10-20

Where does the road to the cross begin? As we once again begin this week our Lenten journey, it is important that we remember that the road to the cross began long before the Son of God was born in Bethlehem. The need for a redemptive Messiah was clear at the Garden of Eden, and humanity’s inability to self-remedy the situation only grew more evident as the story of God’s interaction with man unfolds. In Abraham there was hope, a Covenant people was formed, but when clarity of God’s standard was shown through the Law of Moses the inability of mankind to live up to it was clear. God then sent prophets like Isaiah to warn his people of the consequences of disobedience, and it is through the eyes of Isaiah that this message, and the next five to follow, will look at the road to the cross.


How does God feel about half-hearted obedience? The people of Israel are raked over the coals in chapter one of Isaiah for thinking that they could continue lives both lacking in righteous deeds and full of sin and yet still appear before God with sacrifices, worship, and prayer. God rejects all such attempts by his own Covenant people, the people with whom he is supposed to have a relationship, as a father to his children, or a husband to his wife. The lack of real obedience by God’s people leads him to label their efforts as “meaningless”, “detestable”, and “burden” that he will no longer bear.

The same warning that applied to the descendants of Abraham applies to the Church today. Not to America, or any other nation, we have no Covenant with God, but to his universal Church, the bride of Christ, to whom the New Covenant has been given. If we do not root out sin in our midst, as individuals, families, and local churches, our acts of worship and prayer will be just as useless as Israel’s. God desires a relationship with his people, we cannot hope to please God if we don’t take our commitment to him seriously.

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Is a little knowledge of the history of the Bible a good thing?

I just finished a two week presentation on the History of the English Bible at our regular Wednesday evening Bible study.  More than half the people who attended were from other churches, a fact that is encouraging as evidence of the desire of ordinary people in the pews of our churches to know the history of the book they turn to for answers to the most important questions in life.
The question in the title reflects a quote I found for my presentation from a King James Only partisan who would rather put his faith in a perfect 17th Century translation of the Bible than study the actual history of the transmission of the text down through the centuries.  He contended that we need to take the perfection of the Bible (in his view only the 1611 KJV, the modern versions being of the devil) on faith.  I started my presentation by telling the people who had come to learn about the Bible that in fact they don't have to take it on faith that we have the same words that were written by Moses, David, Luke, and Paul.  The story of the copying and translating of the Bible is a fascinating piece of history in its own right, but it is also an amazing tale of bravery, dedication, and scrupulous scholarship. 
To learn about the history of the Bible is to learn about a human process.  The doctrine of the inspiration of Scripture is the portion of that process that we need to take on faith.  In other words, I believe that when Isaiah, or John, or James was writing Scripture God had a hand in the process.  The words came from men, but were inspired by God, the words reflected the vocabulary and history of those men, but the truths flowing through them were God's.  From that point, when the original autographs, penned by the authors, began to be copied and circulated, the process was not divine, but human.  Errors and mistakes crept in; imagine copying the whole Bible by hand, wouldn't you makes a few mistakes along the way?  But, instead of wrecking our faith in the Bible, this process actually uplifts it.  The copyists mistakes have been preserved.  That's a good thing, it means that the original text is in there too.  When we compare the thousands of copies of the Bible, spread out all around the Roman world and beyond, spanning more than a thousand years, primarily in Greek, but also translated into a half dozen other languages, an amazing thing happens.  The copies agree with each other.  The copying mistakes fall away and become evident, so much so that an agreement of 98% can be made.
Wait a minute, only 98%?  Forget for a moment that the number dwarfs any other ancient document in accuracy of copies, as well as number and age of the copies, is that good enough?  Are we better off pretending that any one particular version of the Bible is perfect?  No, we're not.  The vast majority of the 2% not in agreement are Orthodox statements in and of themselves.  For example, the extra part of I John 5:7-8 that was added by a copyist 1,000 years after John penned the letter.  Is the statement Orthodox?  Clearly, it is a trinitarian statement that we all would agree with.  John would have agree with it, he just didn't write it.  Do we lose the doctrine of the trinity without it?  Of course not.  Any doctrine in the Bible worth fighting for is in the Bible in a lot of places.  Is idolatry bad, um, yeah, the Bible condemns it hundreds of times.  Are we supposed the help the poor, we're told to do so everywhere.  Is Jesus Christ the risen Lord, the Son of God?  The NT is full of confirmation of that teaching, we don't rely on any one verse or phrase to declare it.
The Bible is the most historically accurate and at the same time the most scrutinized document of the ancient world.  It stands up to the assault of any critic who would doubt its accuracy and trounces them with facts.  You don't have to take it on faith that your Bible today is conveying to you the same ideas, thoughts, and truths of the original authors, it is a historical fact far more attested to than anything else we know about human history.  Is it the Word of God?  That's where faith comes in.  A little knowledge of the history of the Bible is a good thing, it will increase your faith in the Word of God.

Sermon Video: Paul and Barnabas part company - Acts 15:30-41

Paul and Barnabas were an amazing team, the work they accomplished for the sake of the Gospel was groundbreaking, but they didn't last.  The friendship and teamwork that they had built together over years of working for the Lord was put to the test not by a difference of opinion about what God wanted them to do, but by the question of who they should bring along to help do it.  When Paul proposed a second missionary trip to visit again the churches from the first, Barnabas was in agreement that this was a task that needed to be done.  The disagreement arose when Barnabas wanted to take along his cousin John Mark and Paul refused to consider including him.  Mark had been a member of the first trip but had for an unknown reason abandoned them mid-way through it.  Whatever that reason was, it left a bad taste in Paul's mouth and he was unwilling to use this mission as a reclamation project.
Well meaning Christian who are trying to serve God can still disagree on how to do it.  We may even agree on the larger goals, see a common path to take to get there, and then still fail to see eye to eye on the details.  It happens, sometimes through our own failures and hang-ups and sometimes simply through seeing things differently.  Barnabas believed in people, he was willing to risk the mission to save one man, much as he had done years before when he stood up for Paul when nobody else would.  Barnabas is trying to win the battle, he's looking at an individual tree.  Paul is looking at the grand vision, the massive task that Jesus has commanded his disciples to bring the Gospel to the ends of the earth, he's trying to win the war, looking at the whole forest.  This isn't a question of who is right or who is wrong, they just disagree.
Paul and Barnabas went there separate ways, Barnabas taking Mark along and Paul finding a new partner in Silas.  The question for us today is not how can we prevent disagreements from happening, they're inevitable in an organization full of reformed sinners with limited wisdom, the question is how can we deal with them without destroying that which we all love, Christ's Church, in the process.
There is a positive note to the end of this story, Barnabas was right about Mark.  Later on Paul will write about Mark being a valuable partner in his ministry, someone he can count on.  We serve the God of second chances, and evidently Paul eventually gave Mark one too.

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Sermon Video: The Council at Jerusalem, Acts 15:1-19

There have been many Church Councils in the past two thousand years, most of the helpful, a few not so much.  The very first of them was held at Jerusalem under the leadership of Jesus' half-brother James over the question of how to include the new gentile believers in Jesus Christ in the Church that was at this point predominately Jewish.  If this first Council not successfully resolved the controversial issue at hand, the Church would have split far sooner than the Great Schism of 1054.
The issue debated at this first Council arose because individual from Judea decided that they needed to go down to Antioch to tell the Gentiles there that, "unless you are circumcised...you cannot be saved."  In other words, unless these gentile believers were willing to follow the whole Law of Moses, their belief in the salvation through Jesus Christ would be insufficient to save them.  This issue had been simmering behind the scenes throughout the first half of Acts, but now it was boiling over.  Paul and Barnabas opposed their message, and the leadership of the Church of Antioch decided to send them, along with other representatives, to Jerusalem to the disciples to resolve the issue.
After much debate, Peter stood up and took the side of the gentiles by proclaiming that God had not only sent him, and others, to them, but had also validated their work by giving the same Holy Spirit to them as he had given to the Jewish believers at Pentecost.  If God had approved their salvation by faith, apart from the Law, who would gainsay God?  In addition, Peter points out the fatal flaw in the argument of those in favor of extending the Law to the gentiles: Nobody is keeping the Law.  The history of God's chosen people is a story of broken promises on the part of the people who failed to keep the Covenant.  If the Jews couldn't keep the Law, "a yoke that neither we nor our fathers have been able to bear", why would anyone believe that the first chosen people had been saved by anything but God's grace?  Indeed, Peter concludes, "it is through grace...that we are saved, just as they are."
When Peter finishes, Paul and Barnabas add the testimony of their recent successful mission's trip among the gentiles, but the final answer awaits the decision of James.  James, known for his piety and reverence for the Temple, agrees with Peter that this decision has been made by God, as predicted by the Prophets, and thus "we should not make it difficult for the Gentiles who are turning to God."
With that decision the Council at Jerusalem manages to avoid the splintering of the Church along ethnic lines that had been threatening its unity.  Their wisdom speaks to us today as we ask ourselves, how are we hindering the Gospel through our actions or inaction?  What obstacles have we put in the way of the Lost hearing the accepting the Gospel?  Whatever those things may be, we as a Church must rid ourselves of them because the Lost are coming to God by grace, just as we did.

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