Satan loses in the end, why are we so scared?

When did Americans, a people blessed by God with far greater freedom and prosperity than any other who have gone before us, become afraid of the future?  When did the Church of Jesus Christ, the institution that has overcome and withstood for two thousand years, and that Jesus promised would be victorious over the very Gates of Hell, become convinced that evil is more powerful than good?  I ask these questions because I often notice a disturbing trend of negativity and pessimism that infects both Americans in general and Christian Americans in particular.  Are there serious challenges to our nation and our Church?  Of course there are, but these are nothing new under the sun, history is full of such challenges, both ancient and recent.  Is evil trying to win; are there truly bad things that could happen?  Of course there are, but there are also righteous men and women willing to stand in the gap and fight.  The character of Tauriel in the second Hobbit movie, the Desolation of Smaug, asked just such a question of Legolas (I know it’s not from the book, relax), “When did we let Evil become stronger than us?”  That question was in response to the hide behind a moat mentality of her king, Thranduil, who is more interested in protecting his own kingdom than engaging and defeating the evil that exists in his world.

I live and serve a church in a small town in Western Pennsylvania.  There are over fifty churches within ten miles of my church, and yet rather than seeing this as a massive blessing from God, an opportunity to utilize our resources to make a big difference in our county, too many local Christians are stuck in a defensive posture that assumes that the Church is failing.

In recent weeks I have heard a variety of doom and gloom predictions, one of them from a local pastor who was told such by his bishop, and all of them ranging from unlikely to nearly impossible, yet all of them held as serious threats to our immediate future.  In no particular order: Churches will lose their 501(c)(3) status if they don’t perform gay weddings, the US government is about to give control over the internet to the UN, and Christians will soon be a minority in America because a growing population of Muslims will institute Shiara Law.  I can’t think of any reason to believe that any of these things will happen, in my lifetime or otherwise, in the United States, yet many of the people in our churches believe things very much like this.  The common thread in most unfounded fears on the part of American Christians is an intense distrust of the government (where unknown and unnamed forces are the usual bad guy, especially when it also involves the UN) and a firm belief that the future will be worse than the present.

There are too many causes for those intertwined fears to explain here, but suffice it to say that such fears assume that there are virtually no Christians working within our government, that the same things hold true of the judiciary, and that everybody at the UN is working against God.  Of course that isn’t true, but anecdotal fears outweigh evidence, and convincing people to trust that the freedom we’ve enjoyed in this nation wouldn’t be given away by a President or a Congress that they dislike is no small task.

Why are we so afraid?  Whatever happened to us to make such doom and gloom predictions feel inevitable?

I’m not participating in the pessimism party, not just because it’s an oxymoron.  I don’t believe that God just gives up on a people because of one court ruling, or one new law.  I don’t believe that decline is inevitable, and I’m certainly not going to drink that Kool-Aid based on anyone theory about the onset of the End Times.  God is more than capable of causing revival in America; he’s done it before, more than once, he can do it again.  Even if America’s best days were behind her, America is not the Church.  The Church of Jesus Christ is growing faster, more vibrant and alive, in South America, Africa, and South East Asia, today than ever before.  If we don’t want to be a part of the victory of Christ’s Church anymore, God will work with those willing to serve him still.  I, for one, am not about to give up, God is still doing marvelous things amongst his people here; the future is, as always, in his hands.

Sermon Video: "Seek the LORD while he may be found" - Isaiah 55:5-12

Is God far from us or near at hand?  To those who continue to walk in darkness, God will never be found, but to those who choose to abandon wickedness and seek God, he will always be available.  This willingness on the part of God to be found by people who did not know him, if only they repent, as well as the vilest of sinners, if only they repent, often causes the people of God to react with confusion.  It makes sense to us that God would have saved us, by why them, or why that type of person?  Our own self-righteousness if a very dangerous thing, something Jesus spent much time in the Gospel combating, and here in Isaiah 55 it prompts God to say, “my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways”.

The will of God has often been misrepresented as something mysterious, even puzzling, when in reality God has made it clear that we don’t understand his will simply because it is based upon a love and mercy that goes beyond our ability to accept.  The “thoughts” and “ways” of this passage are not referring to the disappointments of life that happen to the followers of God, instead it speaks to the effort by God to find as many people as possible who would be willing to find forgiveness by trusting in him.  God’s ways are above ours because he includes people we’d overlook, and God’s ways are better than our ways because he includes types of sinners that we somehow think are worse than we were before the blood of the Lamb washed us clean.  God’s thoughts and ways are not ours, and that’s a good thing; good for any lost sinner willing to return to our heavenly Father.

To watch the video, click on the link below:
Sermon Video

"For my thoughts are not your thoughts..." Isaiah 55:8

There are a lot of verses in the Bible that people quote without really understanding whether or not they apply to the situation at hand.  Christians often quote Isaiah's words about the will of God when talking about tragic situations like cancer, a house fire, a hurricane, or simply some loss or failure that doesn't make any sense to us.  In that vein, this verse is much like Romans 8:28-29, a verse that when taken out of context doesn't necessary lead us into error, per se, but certainly takes us away from the point that the writer, and thus God, are trying to make.
In Isaiah 55, God is expressing his willingness to not only save and restore Israel after the upcoming judgment falls upon them, but surprisingly he plans to include the nations that haven't even heard his name yet in his redemption.  In verses 6-7 God explains that he is near and easily found by anyone who is willing to repent by turning from their wickedness.  It is at this moment that God says, "my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways."  He certainly isn't talking about understanding or coping with tragedy or misfortune, but instead about how God's love and mercy for sinners is beyond our understanding.
The people of God have a long running tendency to exclude those they don't like or aren't comfortable with from the reach of God's mercy.  This began with the people of Israel and continue in the history of the Church.  From Moses to Jesus it was the Jews who were reluctant to extend God's grace to the Gentiles, once the Gentiles took over the Church they turned the tables and ensured that the Jews were no longer welcome, and later on added in other undesirable such as the American Indians, African slaves, and other groups.  It took generations of dedicated work by missionaries and reformers to fight back against this latent racism, to purge the Church of a willingness to forget about those who had not yet been given a chance to accept the call of God to repent.
This same line of reasoning applies to God's willingness to forgive repentant sinners that have either fallen too far in our view, or who have committed sins that we find more repugnant than the ones we've been guilty of.  At times this manifests itself in a reluctance to forgive those whose crimes against God seem somehow more grave than our own, at other times it shows up as a reluctance to allow our social club feeling of Church to be distracted by the likes of such sinners as drunkards, drug users, prostitutes, gamblers, or those with sexual perversions.  Are the sins of vanity, greed, or good ol' heterosexual fornication somehow a better class of sin?  Are those who have already received God's forgiveness somehow superior to those who are about to?
Why are God's "thoughts" and "ways" not our own?  Because we have not yet allowed the transforming power of the Holy Spirit to eradicate the self-righteousness from our own thoughts and attitudes to the extent that we  begin to see what God see when he looks upon a Lost sinner, a child of God who needs to come home.  That God's "thoughts" and "ways" are not our own is a good thing, a merciful, loving thing, thanks be to God.

Sermon Video: We Can't Save Ourselves - Isaiah 64:4-9

Continuing along the rode through Isaiah that explains the need for the Cross, we come to Isaiah’s explanation as to why the people of God cannot repair the damage caused by their sinfulness on their own. Isaiah begins by reminding his audience that there are no other gods to turn to, that only God has shown care for those who follow him. The lack of other options beyond God makes sense when connected to the end of verse five where the lack of commitment to the Law of God shows that the descendant of Abraham are truly in trouble because of their disobedience. Isaiah asks, “How then can we be saved?”


That the answer to Isaiah’s question is, “we can’t do it ourselves, we need God to save us” is made painfully clean when Isaiah shares three metaphors that explain the inability of even God’s people to rectify the situation themselves. The first, that we are all “unclean” connects to the Law’s designation of some people as being temporarily unclean, a status that could be changed, but on that prevented fellowship until it was solved. That the entirety of God’s people could be designated as “unclean” despite their many sacrifices is a sobering thought that explains the seriousness of the damage done by sin to the relationship with God.

The second metaphor is even more shocking, Isaiah says that, “all our righteous acts are like filthy rags”. That righteous deeds could be nullified because of the impure hears of those doing them is another illustration that this is a relationship with God that we’re talking about; God isn’t just some cosmic good vs. evil meter, our hearts matter too. The “filthy rags” of the NIV (and most English translations) are literally a Hebrew euphemism for a woman’s menstrual cloths. In other words, Isaiah actually said, “all our righteous acts are like bloody tampons”; point taken.

Lastly, Isaiah compares God’s people to leaves that have fallen from the tree, shriveled up, and blown away. There is no hope for that leaf, its days are over; so too are we hopeless unless God rescues us.

The last portion of the passage is an appeal to God as our Father, Creator, and Judge to save us despite our sin, to remember that he is the one who initiated the relationship, and appeal to God’s mercy. Why did Jesus have to walk to Calvary, because mankind had wandered away from God, and we don’t have the ability to walk back on our own.

To watch the video, click on the link below: Sermon Video

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.

To watch the video, click on the link below: Sermon Video