Sermon Video: "he was pierced for our transgressions" - Isaiah 53:1-6

If you watch a movie about the death of Jesus Christ on the cross you would have an understanding of what happened.  It’s important that we know the details of what happened during the passion of Jesus, but it can’t end there, we need to know more.  We need to know why God would not only allow this brutality, but plan it.  We need to know what God was trying to accomplish by sending his only Son to die a martyr’s death.  There has to be larger purpose to the cross.

Isaiah 53 contains a detailed description of a servant sent by God who would one day be rejected by his people, suffer, and die.  In Isaiah’s prophecy we see that this servant would not attract people to himself because of his beauty (not a celebrity), and that instead he would be “despised and rejected by men”.  Sadly, that wouldn’t set him apart from the rest of the prophets, the majority of whom, like Isaiah, were rejected by the people of God.  We’re also told that he was a “man of sorrows, and familiar with suffering.”  So, what is God up to?  Why would he send an ordinary looking servant, only to have him suffer real sorrows, what would that accomplish?

In verses four through six we find out that “he took up our infirmities and carried our sorrows”, and that “he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities”.  How can this be?  You or I can’t do anything of the sort for those we love; any loving parent would do that for his/her child if possible, but we can’t.  So, how can this servant of God actually take these horrific things from us?  As a man just like us, but without sin, Jesus could do something you or I could never do.  Here is where we understand why the cross was necessary.  It enabled Jesus to stand in our place so that the “punishment that brought us peace was upon him.”  Sin is rebellion against God, it has consequences, it has to have consequences or else our existence is meaningless.  Without judgment, anarchy reigns.  Therefore God cannot just ignore our sins; he can’t just pretend it doesn’t matter.  Jesus wasn’t hiding our sin on the cross, he was carrying it.  Jesus wasn’t finding a way around the consequences for our sins, he was paying for them.

Why did Jesus die on the cross?  To save us from our sins.  It wasn’t to be a good example, it wasn’t to prove a point, it was to do the only thing that could be done to reconcile humanity to God.  The next time you watch a depiction of the crucifixion, or contemplate an artist’s rendering, consider something beyond the nails and the crown of thorn.  Consider the heaping pile of moral filth resting on the shoulders of the innocent Lamb of God.  It was this sin that caused the Father to look away for three hours as darkness covered the land; it was this sin that caused Jesus to cry out, “my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”  And it was this sin that Jesus knew he had fully paid for when he cried out at the end, “It is finished.”

To watch the video, click on the link below:

Sermon Video 

God's Not Dead - thoughts on the movie

The new movie, God’s Not Dead, will be applauded by many Christians and absolutely hated by some Christians, many agnostics, and most atheists.  That in and of itself doesn’t really say anything about the quality of the movie, but more about the fractured nature of modern American politics and culture.  I was hoping that this movie would portray Christians more as we are, flawed but forgiven, and the issues surrounding belief with more depth as the direction we are going in life, not just a moment’s decision.  That really wasn’t the case, but I sympathize with the difficulty of making such emotional and intellectual decisions of faith into a film’s format and actually having it come off as genuine.

The premise of the movie itself reflects one of the deepest fears of Evangelical Christians, namely the institutions of higher education in America.  There is good reason to be wary of the education offered by some institutions, it isn’t intended to be from a Christian perspective, nor is it intended to be a place that teaches Christian morality.  This fear of what will happen to Christian teens when they go away to college reflects more upon the Church, however, than the colleges.  Christian parents worry what will happen when their child is taught something they wouldn’t approve of by a professor who has a pluralistic agenda {as all professors and teachers do, an agenda is natural}.  One of the biggest reasons why this fear continues to pervade the modern Church is that too many churches only teach children what to do and what not to do without teaching them how to think in a God honoring way.  A list of rules is not the way to teach a child how to experience the love of God in his/her life.

When a kid is two or three the answers are simple, but as they grow and mature we need to take their intellect seriously and actually teach them how to read and understand the Bible, how to deal with complicated and difficult social issues, and how to resist the temptation to join in on the short-sighted, pleasure based, culture of college campuses.  The real danger to a young, and not very worldly wise, Christian teen is not the college professor, it’s the rest of the people sharing his/her dorm.  That is, if they’ve been told, “don’t drink, don’t have sex” without anything to go with it that shows them the truth that God has a larger purpose and plan for their lives, that the choices we make today have consequences that echo though our lives, and that God wants what is best for us, not just to take away all the “fun” that they’re being offered.

Taking the moral issues faced by our congregations seriously starts from the top down.  Sermons on Sunday morning need to digest the Word of God, not be just a time for telling stories or sharing platitudes.  We, as pastors, need to demonstrate that we take the Word of God seriously.  We ponder it, we wrestle with it, we admit when we don’t understand it.  We need to show that being a good Christian is far more about living a life of justice, love, and mercy than it is about how we dress, what music we listen to, or which Bible we read.  We need to show our own vulnerability, let our people know that their shepherd struggles to be a man of God {the pastor in the film did reflect this}, but also that we have more to offer to them when they’re struggling than simply quoting back Scripture to them {sadly, that’s mainly what the pastor in the movie did}.

Is God’s Not Dead a good movie?  The movie is ok, but I long for a movie that portrays Christians with more realism than idealism, the issues we face in life with more candor than quotations.  The Christians are still too one dimensional and the non-believers equally so.  Is God’s Not Dead a good Christian movie?  Once again, it’s ok, but the writers are still having the characters speak lines for the audience to hear consisting of full-fledged theological statements rather than realistic dialogue you or I would actually say.  The best example of this is the climactic scene: If I saw someone I didn’t know hit by a car, I’d certainly rush to his/her side, I’d try to comfort them while awaiting the paramedics, and if I thought they were dying I’d ask him/her if they’d found forgiveness from God, I’d ask him/her if they wanted to trust in Jesus, I just wouldn’t ask them so dramatically if they are willing to accept Jesus Christ “as Lord and Savior”.  It isn’t a formula that we have to follow, it’s a commitment to repent and change.  God already knows the sinner’s heart; he doesn’t need me to make sure they get the words exactly right, it was enough for the thief on the cross to ask Jesus “remember me when you come into your kingdom.”  God’s Not Dead is a step in the right direction, better than earlier Christian movies, but it still lacks some of the realism that would really engage both the minds and hearts of believers and non-believers alike.

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.