The year before we moved to Rabat, we visited our youngest daughter who was living in Tanzania. We spent one of our three weeks on a safari which was an absolutely wonderful experience and which included a hot air balloon ride. I have ridden in a hot air balloon only once in my life and I can not think of a better place to have done this than in the Serengeti. On the balloon ride I talked with an American who was studying owl behavior in the Serengetii for his PhD at the University of Madison. He told me that when he came, one of his desires was to see lions on the hunt. So one night he saw the lights of a car coming down the road and thought it might be a woman he knew coming to visit him. He went outside and stood in the dark, waiting to see if it was her. But the car passed by and when he turned on his flashlight, his torch, to head back in, he saw a female lion on the hunt about six meters in front of him, looking straight at him.

He knew what not to do which was to run because that triggers the lion’s instinct to attack. What you are supposed to do is keep eye contact and slowly back away. But he was too scared to do this and turned around, keeping the light shining behind him and slowly walked the 15 meters into his house. When he was safely inside, he turned on the outside lights and saw four female lions around his outhouse. He told me from then on he has used a bottle rather than go outside at night to the outhouse. He told me he came a lot closer to lions on the hunt than he had hoped for.

On our first night at the lodge where we stayed, we noticed a young woman who looked very upset. We were in such a beautiful place we could not imagine why she should be so sad. Then we found out she had come with her boyfriend and sister. The week before we arrived she and her boyfriend said goodnight to her sister and they never saw her again. Apparently she had gone outside in the night and been attacked and carried away. The guides were looking for vultures to see where her body might be.

We drove past a small village where the night watchman had been killed and eaten by a lion that past year.

Also in that past year, some German tourists were driving in their car and got out to get closer to video some lions. The video camera that was left behind showed the lions coming and the couple was killed.

I love walking out in nature, but when you live near lions, you have to be a bit more careful.

Here in Rabat, we do not step out at night and worry that a lion or tiger will spring out of the shadow to attack us, but there is a predator that waits for us in the dark. He prowls, he is constantly alert, watching, seeking a moment of weakness in our lives when we are vulnerable and unprotected, so he can spring out and grab us. This predator wants to destroy us. This predator wants to kill us. We are being stalked by a killer.

1 Peter 5:8
Be self-controlled and alert. Your enemy the devil prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour.

We have different world views in this church. Those of you from Africa have no hesitation in believing the devil is prowling around because you come from a fear/power world view. You know the power of the devil and have learned to take his attacks seriously. You probably have stories you can tell about the power of witchcraft and spells.

Those of you from the West have more difficulty believing the devil is prowling around because you come from a guilt/innocence world view. You tend to view the devil as a comic figure with a red tail, horns and a pitchfork. The devil is a mythical figure, not real and not to be taken seriously.

But regardless of the world view you have grown up with and regardless of what you think, the devil prowls around seeking his chance to grab you. The devil is not a philosophical or theological metaphor. The devil is real, not abstract, and not imaginary. The devil is dangerous, not a cute costume for children to dress up in.

The devil is fighting against God and in his fighting, you are insignificant. The devil does not care at all about you. The only reason the devil pays any attention to you is because you are loved by God. And because the devil is at war with God he seeks to destroy those God loves. So the devil will come to you and flatter you, lure you, seduce you so he can get his claws into you and rip you apart, pull you away from God and destroy your life.

The devil is known by many names in the Bible. Among other names, he is called the accuser, the adversary, Beelzebub, the deceiver, the evil one, the father of lies, Lucifer, the ruler of this world and Satan. But the one that relates to the text this morning in James is that he is called the tempter.

When Jesus was fasting in the wilderness, the devil came to him. (Matthew 4:3)
And the tempter came and said to him, “If you are the Son of God, command these stones to become loaves of bread.”

The devil came to Jesus in his hunger and tempted him with food. He came to Jesus who was realizing the difficult path he had to take and tempted him with a shortcut. The devil looked to see where Jesus was weak and tempted him in his area of vulnerability.

James writes:
Let no one say when he is tempted, “I am being tempted by God,” for God cannot be tempted with evil, and he himself tempts no one. 14 But each person is tempted when he is lured and enticed by his own desire. 15 Then desire when it has conceived gives birth to sin, and sin when it is fully grown brings forth death.

James grew up by the Sea of Galilee and if he was not a fisherman, he was familiar with fishing. And so he uses a fishing image to describe the process the devil uses. A metal hook is thrown into the water but only by accident will anyone catch a fish with a bare hook. So an attractive lure is put on the hook. It can be a piece of fish or a worm or an artificial lure. The hook with the bait or lure now sits in the water, moving back and forth with the movement of the sea and rod, calling out to the fish to come and take a nibble. When the fish nibbles the fisherman senses the pull on the string and yanks up the rod and now the fish is caught. It struggles but slowly the fisherman reels in the fish, against its will. The fish was tempted, it nibbled, and now it is no longer master but being pulled against its will to its destruction.

Temptation is not a game. It is a life and death struggle.

James writes:
each person is tempted when he is lured and enticed by his own desire.

When James is talking about desire, he is talking about fleshly, illicit desire. Most often in the New Testament this refers to sexual sin but the word has a broader meaning, including any longing we have for what God has prohibited, for any forbidden fruit. For now let me focus on sexual sin.

If we fit the statistics, I would guess that 50-75% of us in this church are having a problem with pornography on the internet. We may not talk about it and for many of us, no one else knows what we are doing on the internet. But this is a huge problem and a major area of temptation.

It used to be that the local community acted as a guard against sexual sin. Anything you did, the community knew about it. The closeness of the community acted as a restraint. But then as technology developed, people traveled farther away from home and were able to do what they wanted and the people in their community knew nothing about it. But even then there were those who sold you the magazines or watched you walk into the movie theater. You could not be anonymous.

But today you can click on the internet in the privacy of your bedroom and be totally anonymous (except for the search engines who pay attention to where you go and use that information to market to you). You don’t have to go into a store and buy a magazine with everyone knowing you are buying that magazine. You simply click and away you go.

I want to say at the outset that sexual desire is not evil. God created you as a sexual being and gave you your sexual desire. Because God gives us only good gifts, this makes our sexual desire a good thing. The evil comes not from having the desire but in how it is used. Sexual desire in marriage leads to intimacy. In the Marriage Course Annie and I sponsor, they teach that, in marriage, sex is not the icing on the cake, it is the cake itself. Sex in marriage is necessary to build intimacy between a husband and wife. Sexual desire in marriage is a good thing because it binds the husband and wife together in an intimate relationship.

But when that desire attempts to be satisfied outside of a marriage relationship, what happens? Certainly not intimacy.

It is very difficult not to get pulled into the world of porn. I search for images for the bulletin cover and for birthday cards I make. I once looked for an image for a injured football player and among the images were some sexy pictures of women. What an injured football player had to do with those pictures I have no idea, but sex pops up on the internet all the time. When I download a TV program, a woman pops up to proposition me, wanting me to talk with her. These pictures are far too graphic for me and I try to get out of that screen as soon as I can.

The problem for us is these images are only a click away. It takes no effort to click. We don’t have to work out to get in shape. Instead of moving the mouse to the top to get out of the screen, all we have to do is move the mouse down to the picture and with just a little movement of the finger, there we are. We look at one picture which leads to another and get drawn deeper and deeper into the porn world. And what results? Are we rewarded with a feeling of intimacy? What kind of intimacy can be achieved when you are by yourself in a dark room touching yourself?

The world of porn is a fantasy world where everyone thinks you are fantastic and no one ever argues with you. How can you find intimacy in a world of fantasy?

When you engage in sex outside of a committed, married relationship, what happens? That relationship too is a fantasy relationship. You get together, each of you wearing your nice clothes. You have fun and then each go back to your own place. You don’t have to deal with dirty underwear or the daily discussion of who is going to cook and clean and fold laundry and pay bills. Even in a longer term relationship where intimacy may develop, where is the security that this person will stay with you no matter what happens? When reality does intrude into this fantasy relationship and there is no marriage commitment to keep you together, the relationship dissolves.

The desire God gave is so often misused and leads to dark alleys of death, not a path of life.

But when desire leads to where God intended it to lead, then it provides sweet intimacy, a safe haven in the world, a relationship where we are loved, valued and respected.

Obviously, not all marriages end this way. Being married is not a guarantee that this kind of relationship will result. Marriage takes a lot of hard work and sacrifice. But the path of sexual desire in a marriage relationship has the potential to lead to the intimacy we crave.

The world of porn does not satisfy. None of the things we lust for: money, sex or power can satisfy. Frederick Buechner defines lust as the craving for salt of a man who is dying of thirst. The more we have, the more we crave. The more porn we watch, the more we need to watch. After awhile pictures are not enough and we need to watch video. Then the videos need to become more and more graphic. Then we have to be involved some way or another in the action ourselves.

The reason we get pulled deeper and deeper into porn is that it does not and cannot satisfy us. All it can do is increase our longing for intimacy.

James tells us:
But each person is tempted when he is lured and enticed by his own desire. 15 Then desire when it has conceived gives birth to sin, and sin when it is fully grown brings forth death.

We see the picture dangling on the hook. We get curious and take a closer look. We nibble and the hook is jerked up and we are hooked. Then it is just a matter of time as we are dragged to where we do not want to go. We are no longer masters of ourselves. We are slaves to our sin.

I have talked a lot about pornography because it is such a problem and has such a negative effect on our lives, but the same process is true of our lust for money and power.

Money is good and so is power, when they have their proper place and are used well. But as soon as we lust for money and lust for power, the lust takes over and we become slaves to our desires.

James writes:
13 Let no one say when he is tempted, “I am being tempted by God,” for God cannot be tempted with evil, and he himself tempts no one. 14 But each person is tempted when he is lured and enticed by his own desire. 15 Then desire when it has conceived gives birth to sin, and sin when it is fully grown brings forth death.
16 Do not be deceived, my beloved brothers.

What is the deception James is talking about? Don’t be deceived by what? This verse goes back to verse 13 and to verse 2.

Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds,

When trials come, our temptation is to say, “God, why are you doing this to me?” We ask why God allowed someone to be so sick or why he allowed someone to die. We ask why we have to suffer so much from financial problems or why God allows someone rich and powerful to take advantage of us.

Death, disease and injustice inflict themselves on us and James wants to be perfectly clear that these things do not come from God. God does not put death, disease and injustice into our lives so we can grow in faith. These things come from living in a fallen world where the devil is active and prowling around to see who he can devour. God uses these things to bring good into our lives, growing our faith, but he does not create them.

When James writes about being lured and enticed by our own desires, he is not unaware of the devil’s part in all of this. Later in James 4:7–8 he writes:
Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you.

Remember that James was nicknamed “camel knees” because of all the time he spent praying. And when someone prays with that devotion, they know very intimately the presence of the devil. People who pray like this are called “prayer warriors” because they battle with the devil as they pray for the will of God to be lived out on earth as it is in heaven.

James knew from personal experience that when he was tempted and submitted to God, the devil was resisted and fled away.

John wrote: (1 John 4:4)
he who is in you is greater than he who is in the world.

This was the experience of James, the experience of John, the experience of Martin Luther, and the experience of every son and daughter of God who has struggled against the temptations and attacks of the devil. Submit to God, resist the devil and he will flee from you.

You cannot submit half-heartedly. To use the words of James in the preceding verses, you cannot be double-minded, wanting the pleasures of the flesh and victory over the devil at the same time. With your whole heart and mind, submit to God and you will have victory over the temptations of the devil.

James continues:
16 Do not be deceived, my beloved brothers. 17 Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change.

When John is describing the new Jerusalem, our heavenly destination, he uses this same image of light: (Revelation 21:23)
And the city has no need of sun or moon to shine on it, for the glory of God gives it light, and its lamp is the Lamb.

Light without shadow is a description of a world without sin. This is why it is not possible for God to be the one who sends us temptations. There is no shadow in God, he is all light.

We talk about shady characters who are out to take advantage of others. They manipulate and deceive and are not to be trusted. But God cannot manipulate us or deceive us because there are no shady parts to his character. God cannot tempt us because he can only work to build us up, not tear us down.

When you surrender to Jesus and accept his gift of salvation, his light comes into your life. But we still have dark areas in our lives and the Holy Spirit comes to begin to work with us, to bring the light of Christ into the dark areas of our life so we can see the mess and begin to work with the Holy Spirit to clean it up.

This is an ongoing process and as we cooperate with the Holy Spirit, we become more clean. But when we give in to temptation, we create more dark areas of our lives with more messes to be cleaned up. We can become quite discouraged.

Imagine you buy a new house that was on sale because the previous owners had not taken good care of it. As you step in the front door there is a little place to walk but then there are piles and piles of junk and garbage to be thrown out. As you make your way through the house it is such a mess, every room needing to be cleaned up. Every room needs to be painted.

You can feel helpless. How will you, by yourself, be able to get the house cleaned up? But here is the great news: just outside the front door is a team of workers with huge garbage dumpsters and paint brushes, ready to come help you. You are not alone. You have help with what seems to be an overwhelming task.

You may feel this way about areas of your life. Some rooms in your life are so messy, it seems hopeless. It seems you will never be able to get that part of your life clean.

But there is hope. The Holy Spirit came to work with you, to help you clean up the messes in your life. You are not working alone. God wants you to succeed. God wants you to be so filled with his light that there is no longer any darkness in you.

Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians 10:13
No temptation has overtaken you that is not common to man. God is faithful, and he will not let you be tempted beyond your ability, but with the temptation he will also provide the way of escape, that you may be able to endure it.

God will not let you drown. He will reach out to you when you cry for help, just as he did with Peter on the Sea of Galilee, and pull you to your feet. But you have to cry out for help. You have to submit to God with all your heart and mind. Then the devil will flee and you will find the strength to resist the temptation that is pressing on your life.

There is one other major resource for you in resisting temptation. God created us to live in community. We are meant to be in close fellowship with other followers of Jesus. We are not meant to resist the devil on our own. We are meant to be in community and rely on those close to us to help us resist the devil’s attacks on our lives.

This is why I tell people we have to be in accountability groups. We need to create the community that is no longer there. We need people who will ask us personal questions and help us resist sexual and other temptations. If you are not meeting regularly with other brothers or sisters to help you live your Christian life, you are asking for trouble. You need others to help you walk in the light.

Seriously, today after church, talk to someone and begin meeting together. If you have questions about how to do this, talk to Elliot or Connie or me and we can give you some advice. We need each other if we are to walk in the light and cooperate with the Holy Spirit as we clean up the dark areas of our lives.

There is one last verse in this section of James:
18 Of his own will he brought us forth by the word of truth, that we should be a kind of firstfruits of his creatures.

When you are being tempted and have given in, at least partially, to the temptation, you can think terrible things about yourself. The devil, sometimes called the accuser, whispers in our ear, telling us how terrible we are, telling us that God is tired of our failure and is giving up on us, telling us we might as well give up as well.

But James wants us to know that God who gives good and perfect gifts, in whom there is no shadow, who is only light, God brought us by the word of truth into his kingdom. The perfection of Jesus was given to cover over our sins. God chose to do this of his own will. He did not have to do this. He chose to do this. And because God brought us into his kingdom, our new “born again” life with him is one of his good and perfect gifts.

We become frustrated and discouraged because we have such trouble resisting sexual sin or resisting the fame and adulation of the world or resisting the lust for money and power. We struggle. All of us, in one way or another struggle, but we need to know that in the midst of our struggles, God loves us. God chose us. God thinks we are wonderful.

God grieves when we hurt ourselves by giving in to temptation. But he never stops loving us.

This morning when you come forward for communion, come in submission to God. Resist the devil. Come knowing you are loved. Come knowing the Holy Spirit is at work in you. Come with a determination to cooperate with the Holy Spirit and clean up the messy rooms in your life.

Are you rich or poor?

In most communities in the world, there are wealthy congregations and poorer congregations. It is not normal to have a wide range of incomes in the same church. But we are an exceptional church in many ways and one of these is that in our diversity, there is a wide range of incomes. Some of us own cars and drive to church while others save the 4.5 dirhams it costs to ride the bus and walk to church.

The followers of Jesus James wrote to in this letter were meeting in synagogues that had this kind of economic diversity. This created difficulties that make the relationship of rich and poor a major theme in James’ letter. These verses in chapter 1 are the first mention of this theme.
9 Let the lowly brother boast in his exaltation, 10 and the rich in his humiliation, because like a flower of the grass he will pass away. 11 For the sun rises with its scorching heat and withers the grass; its flower falls, and its beauty perishes. So also will the rich man fade away in the midst of his pursuits.

What book of the Bible do you think of when you read these verses? Ecclesiastes? Psalms? Proverbs? These books of the Bible are part of what is called Wisdom literature and James comes closest to this genre than any other book of the New Testament.

So we can appreciate this text by itself and learn from it, as we do from Isaiah 40:6–8
All flesh is grass,
and all its beauty is like the flower of the field.
7 The grass withers, the flower fades
when the breath of the Lord blows on it;
surely the people are grass.
8 The grass withers, the flower fades,
but the word of our God will stand forever.

Or Psalm 49:16–17
16 Be not afraid when a man becomes rich,
when the glory of his house increases.
17 For when he dies he will carry nothing away;
his glory will not go down after him.

There is wisdom in these verses of the Bible. The world and all its wealth is fading away and to lust for it or to hold on to it is to make a big mistake. But why did James put these verses in a section of his letter that is talking about persevering with joy when trials come?

Remember, always remember, when you read James, who the letter is addressed to: (James 1:1)
James, a servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ,
To the twelve tribes in the Dispersion:
Greetings.

The Jewish followers of Jesus living in Jerusalem and the surrounding area were forced, because of persecution, to leave and settle in Syria and northern Palestine where they were strangers in a new community. They had to start over to find ways to make a living and so faced tough financial situations. They left behind the social network they were used to and had to establish a new network of friends. They went to the local synagogue and had to explain that they had discovered Jesus was the long awaited Messiah, which may well have created tension with the synagogue leaders. Their disruption of the status quo, the way things had always been, may have caused them to be unwanted and rejected.

This rejection and financial difficulty are some of the trials James had in mind as he wrote this letter, so if we want to understand these verses that carry the same theme as Isaiah 40 and Psalm 49, we need to look at the whole of verses 2-12 in the first chapter of James’ letter.

So let’s summarize the teaching of James thus far. He begins by telling these dispersed Jewish followers of Jesus to consider it joy when trials come. Why? Because they produce perseverance which leads to the development of a deeper faith. This faith that results from perseverance is so precious that the pain of the trial is considered worth enduring.

But then in order to persevere well, wisdom is needed. If wisdom is not present, then the perseverance can be characterized by whining and complaining, by fighting and depression.

Wisdom is a recognition of who God is and knowing our place before him. Wisdom believes that suffering will lead to something better, that there is meaning in the suffering. Wisdom understands that our goal is not an earthly paradise but a heavenly one. Wisdom knows that we are passing through this world as we prepare for our real home.

Perseverance without wisdom is a path that leads to death. Perseverance with wisdom is a path that leads to life.

James then adds one more qualifier to perseverance. He writes that as we persevere with wisdom, we need to make sure we are not double-minded. If we are going to grow in faith, we will have to be clear about our goal and be single-minded in our pursuit of Jesus.

James relies more on the teaching of Jesus, in particular the Sermon on the Mount from the Gospel according to Matthew, than any other New Testament writer. And at this point he is clearly referencing Jesus’ teaching in Matthew 6:24
No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and money.

In our perseverance, this is where most of us get stuck. This is where I get stuck. We are torn between our longing for God and our desire to hold on to the rewards of the world.

I ended the sermon last week with two questions Dallas Willard suggested to John Ortberg as a diagnostic test for our spiritual life. Are we single-minded in our pursuit of God or are we double-minded, trying to serve God and money?

Here are the two questions:
Am I growing more easily discouraged these days?
Am I growing more easily irritated these days?

And when I answer these two questions, I realize that I really am double-minded. I have a very strong longing to serve God, to have a more intimate relationship with God. I want to have an experience of his love and his peace. But I find it so difficult to let go of my attachment to the things of this world. I want my comfort. I want my vacations. I want my retirement home in the woods.

I don’t think I am unique in this. This has been the struggle of followers of Jesus over the centuries. Paul wrote in Romans 7:15
For I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.
I think he was struggling with the same issue that we do. As much as Paul was pursuing God with all his heart, soul and mind, his flesh still wanted to be satisfied with the things the world offers.

The world offers money, possessions, approval, power, fame and we want it. We find it so difficult to let go of these things – which makes us double-minded.

This is why I think James follows in his teaching with these comments about the temporary nature of the wealth of the world. Because wealth, either having it or wanting to have it, is such a problem, it has to be dealt with if we are to persevere and grow in faith when trials come our way.

In this light, let’s take a look at what James is saying to us.
James 1:2–12
Consider it pure joy, my brothers, whenever you face trials of many kinds, 3 because you know that the testing of your faith develops perseverance. 4 Perseverance must finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything. 5 If any of you lacks wisdom, he should ask God, who gives generously to all without finding fault, and it will be given to him. 6 But when he asks, he must believe and not doubt, because he who doubts is like a wave of the sea, blown and tossed by the wind. 7 That man should not think he will receive anything from the Lord; 8 he is a double-minded man, unstable in all he does.
9 The brother in humble circumstances ought to take pride in his high position. 10 But the one who is rich should take pride in his low position, because he will pass away like a wild flower. 11 For the sun rises with scorching heat and withers the plant; its blossom falls and its beauty is destroyed. In the same way, the rich man will fade away even while he goes about his business.
12 Blessed is the man who perseveres under trial, because when he has stood the test, he will receive the crown of life that God has promised to those who love him.

James encourages the brother in humble circumstances to take pride in his high position. Who is the brother in humble circumstances? The brother in humble circumstances is one who has little significance in the world’s opinion. The world looks to the rich and powerful but God has an eye out for those the world ignores, takes for granted, uses and abuses. The Bible frequently mentions widows, orphans and aliens as these forgotten people. To this list we could add the handicapped, street children, house cleaners, parking guardians and servants.

When Mary went to see her cousin Elizabeth after becoming pregnant, she sang in her song of praise about the people of humble circumstances. (Luke 1:52)
he has brought down the mighty from their thrones
and exalted those of humble estate;

The brother or sister in humble circumstances is one who does not have the wealth of the world. The brother or sister in humble circumstances looks around and sees all the things others have that they do not have. They may not live in a nice apartment, may not have a lot of clothes, may have to struggle to find money to pay the rent each month. The brother or sister in humble circumstances may get taken advantage of by those with wealth who pay them very little to work very hard.

The brother or sister in humble circumstances receives the message day after day that they are not important, not of value. The brother or sister in humble circumstances is overlooked by the world and yet James writes that they should boast in their high position. The word James uses here for high position refers to the heavenly realm from which the Spirit descended and to which Jesus ascended. The brother or sister in humble circumstances boasts in their real home in heaven. They boast in being daughters and sons of God. Their situation on earth is only temporary and will soon pass away.

James’ point is that believers have to look past the world’s evaluation of themselves to see who they are. Believers need to look to God and see themselves through his eyes. Who we are is not evaluated by our bank accounts, the number of friends we have on Facebook or how large a truck is needed to help us move. Who we are is how God views us.

A few years ago, my friend Uchenna experienced the racism many Africans face from Moroccans. He got on the bus and sat down next to a Moroccan man. The man looked at him with disgust, got up and sat down in another seat.

How do you handle such an insulting situation. This Moroccan did not like his skin color, his smell, his facial features. This is a highly personal, offensive, degrading insult and yet as Uchenna told me about his experience, this is what he said. “I smiled because I realized that if this man knew what I had to offer him, he would have gotten on his knees and begged me to share words of life with him.”

James says:
Let the brother in humble circumstances boast in his high position,

Uchenna’s identity was not wrapped up in what this man or in what any other man thought of him. Uchenna’s identity was in his relationship with Jesus. He knew he was a child of God, on his way to the kingdom. This is what allowed him to handle the insult with grace.

Let your relationship with God define who you are, not what the world thinks of you or how the world assesses you. The world may say you are inferior and dispensable, but God thinks you are worth enough to die for. God thinks you are worth sacrificing for so you can come into his kingdom. God loves you and thinks you are wonderful and calls you his daughter or son. You have great worth in his eyes.

James continues:
But the one who is rich should take pride in his low position, because he will pass away like a wild flower. 11 For the sun rises with scorching heat and withers the plant; its blossom falls and its beauty is destroyed. In the same way, the rich man will fade away even while he goes about his business.

How do the rich take pride? How do they boast? The rich don’t need to boast, their possessions do it for them. The cars they drive, the clothes they wear, the vacations they take, the jewelry they wear, the home they live in: these all tell the world and themselves how rich they are.

We want to be rich. We want the things the rich have. We want the power being rich brings. But do you realize that it is much more difficult for the rich to be followers of Jesus than the poor?

Does this sound odd to you? Why is it Jesus spent so much time warning about the dangers of money and possessions? He talked more about money and possessions than he did about heaven, prayer, faith or hell.

When the rich young ruler came to Jesus and wanted to follow him, Jesus told him to sell all he had, give it to the poor and then come follow him. When the ruler went away sad because he was not able to do this, Jesus told his disciples: (Matthew 19:23–25)
“Truly, I say to you, only with difficulty will a rich person enter the kingdom of heaven. 24 Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God.”

We want to be wealthy but few people realize the danger that comes with wealth.

Let me explain why it is a spiritual advantage to be poor.

A few years ago there was a man in our church named Anthony who was from India. He worked here repairing automobiles for the Sheik of Abu Dhabi and went home once a year to see his wife and son. One day Anthony received word that his wife and son were being threatened by other members of his family and might lose the house they lived in. Anthony wanted to fly home and deal with the situation but his boss would not give him his passport and he had to stay in Rabat. There was nothing to do but pray and so a few of us met with Anthony and asked God to do what we could not do ourselves.

We prayed for the protection of his family and their home and in a week or so Anthony received word that the family had given up their attempts to take over the house.

Anthony had a sweet, deep faith that was the result of having to trust God for many things in his life. If I had been in his situation, I would have gone straight to the airport, paid for a ticket and flown home to deal with the emergency. I would have hired a lawyer or whatever was needed to be done to protect my interests. At the end I would have resolved the problem, just as Anthony’s problem was resolved. The difference is that Anthony’s faith grew and my faith would not have grown.

The difficulty of having money is that you begin to trust in what you can do with your resources rather than trust in God.

When Annie and I were first married, we were in a church that had a very wealthy family. One  Friday the teenage son in the family had an accident and totaled the car he was driving. The next day his parents went to the car dealer and bought a new car with cash. We were stunned. It was amazing to us that someone could have that much money.

This is the problem the wealthy have: when does God have a chance to provide for them? When the poor have a need, they pray and pray and then when God provides, there is a celebration. When do the rich do this?

James says:
But the one who is rich should take pride in his low position, because he will pass away like a wild flower. 11 For the sun rises with scorching heat and withers the plant; its blossom falls and its beauty is destroyed. In the same way, the rich man will fade away even while he goes about his business.

The challenge for those with wealth is to realize that what they have and the bank account in which they place their trust will disappear and then what will they do? The rich need to turn from trusting in their wealth and realize they are on an even playing field with the poor. Both are headed for an end to this world and need to place their confidence in Jesus who will take them safely where no bank account can go. Holding on to their wealth will only slow them down.

We will come later in James to how the rich and poor are to relate to each other. Here James is telling us how the rich and poor are to relate to God.

The problem is that wealth has a hold on both rich and poor. The rich want to hold on to it and the poor want to get their hands on it.

If you are materially poor, you are rich in Christ and that is where you need to place your identity. If you are materially wealthy, you need to realize your wealth will slip though your hands like sand at the beach and you are in desperate need of Jesus. Both rich and poor need to put their identity in who they are in relationship to Jesus and turn from the world.

Jesus told a parable about being invited to a wedding feast. (Luke 14:7–11 )
“When you are invited by someone to a wedding feast, do not sit down in a place of honor, lest someone more distinguished than you be invited by him, 9 and he who invited you both will come and say to you, ‘Give your place to this person,’ and then you will begin with shame to take the lowest place. 10 But when you are invited, go and sit in the lowest place, so that when your host comes he may say to you, ‘Friend, move up higher.’ Then you will be honored in the presence of all who sit at table with you. 11 For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted.”

The poor know where to sit when they come into the room. They find a spot in the back, perhaps in the corner. The world has taught them they do not deserve any better. But the rich think they deserve to be at the head table with the bride and bridegroom. They are offended if they are not given a place of honor.

Jesus tells the rich to sit in the back. Identify with the poor. Reject what the world says you are and identify with your brothers and sisters in Christ around the world. Humble yourself and realize you are poor in spirit and desperately in need of being saved by Jesus, just like everyone else in the world.

And then there is wonderful news. Jesus will come and take you to a seat of honor. The poor will be led to the head table where they will be honored. The rich who have humbled themselves will be taken to the head table where they will be honored.

As for the rich who sat at the head table, thinking they deserved the honor, they will be taken away and sent out of the room.

Are you rich or poor? I hope you answer this question with more understanding than you did at the beginning of the sermon.

James finishes this section of his letter with the reward that awaits the rich man who sees his spiritual poverty and puts his trust in Jesus and the reward that awaits the poor man who looks past his material poverty and sees who he is in Christ.

Blessed is the man who perseveres under trial, because when he has stood the test, he will receive the crown of life that God has promised to those who love him.

The crown of life is not a king or queen’s crown, it is the crown placed on the head of the triumphant victor in an athletic competition. The crown recognizes all the years of disciplined living and hard training. It recognizes the sacrifices that were made to be successful.

An Olympic athlete puts everything else aside and focuses on training for four years and the image in the front of their mind is that moment of triumph, standing on the medal stand and having a gold medal draped around their neck. And in that moment, all the hard work that it took to get there is worth it.

This is why we consider it joy when trials come. This is why we persevere. This is why we seek wisdom and focus single-mindedly on Jesus. This is why we reject what the world tells us about who we are and focus on how God sees us.

If you are currently going through a trial of some kind or when you face a trial in the future, I cannot promise that it is or will be easy. Trials are painful. They hurt. They can shake your faith to its core. But if you can hold on to the teaching of James and see that moment when you will come face-to-face with Jesus and hear him say to you, “Welcome good and faithful servant,” you can hold on and persevere with wisdom and single-mindedness.

*************

Jeremiah 9:23–24
Thus says the Lord: “Let not the wise man boast in his wisdom, let not the mighty man boast in his might, let not the rich man boast in his riches, 24 but let him who boasts boast in this, that he understands and knows me, that I am the Lord who practices steadfast love, justice, and righteousness in the earth. For in these things I delight, declares the Lord.”

When you read the book of James, it can seem that he had a lot of favorite teachings, wrote them out on slips of paper, threw them up in the air and when they fell, picked them up in any order and put them in a letter.

After all, who starts a letter telling people to consider it joy when trials come? That is not the beginning of a letter; it comes much better later on in the letter after he builds up to it, after saying how proud he is of them for being faithful to Jesus and how much he loves them. (The slip of paper with that gentle introduction must have slipped under a crack in the floor and was lost because you don’t find that anywhere in the letter from James.)

And then what is the connection between his teaching on persevering through trials and the teaching on wisdom that follows and the teaching on being double-minded that follows that? Next week we will get to the next teaching in his letter about how we are to deal with being  rich or poor which is followed by one sentence that goes back to verse 2 about persevering through trials. How does being rich or poor make any difference to persevering through trials?

It takes a bit more work to see the flow than in some other books of the Bible, but there are central themes in James and there is a connection to what he is writing, which we will get to as we move through the sermons on this letter of James. It is important to remember that James was writing to people with particular needs and the teaching he sent to them in this letter was meant specifically to help them with their present condition. James was not completely random in what he wrote.

So let’s begin by reviewing verses 2-4 that I covered last week. James says we are to consider it joy when trials come because they produce perseverance which leads us to wholeness. God grows our faith through the trials that come to us. There is a redemptive purpose in suffering and the faith that results is far greater than the pain that was endured.

This teaching is followed by an encouragement to ask for wisdom.

James 1:2–8
Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds, 3 for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness. 4 And let steadfastness have its full effect, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing.
5 If any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask God, who gives generously to all without reproach, and it will be given him.

James establishes a connection between what can seem to be unrelated teachings by using the phrase, lacking in nothing, in verse 4 and then saying in verse 5, if any of you lacks wisdom. The use of the word lack in both verses indicates they are connected. He seems to be saying that in order to persevere, we will need wisdom. This raises three questions: What is wisdom? What does perseverance without wisdom look like? What does perseverance with wisdom look like?

First of all, what is wisdom?

The book of Job was written to examine the problem of suffering in a world created by a loving God. How could a loving God allow suffering on the part of those he loves?

The book opens with Job described as a man who had it all. (Job 1:2–3)
There were born to him seven sons and three daughters. 3 He possessed 7,000 sheep, 3,000 camels, 500 yoke of oxen, and 500 female donkeys, and very many servants, so that this man was the greatest of all the people of the east.

Job had it all and then in catastrophe after catastrophe, his children were killed and his animals either stolen or destroyed. To top it off, his health deteriorated and he suffered from painful sores on his body.

In his misery and suffering, three friends came to talk with Job and gave long discourses about sin and suffering. For 37 chapters his friends talked to him and gave their advice and Job responded. Finally, in chapter 38 God speaks.
“Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge?
3 Dress for action like a man;
I will question you, and you make it known to me.
4 “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?
Tell me, if you have understanding.

God never directly answers Job’s and his friends’ questions; he simply asks his own questions. Where were you when I …?

After 51 verses of God’s thundering questions, he asks Job one more: (Job 40:2–5)
“Shall a faultfinder contend with the Almighty?
He who argues with God, let him answer it.”

and Job responded with wisdom:
3 Then Job answered the Lord and said:
4 “Behold, I am of small account; what shall I answer you?
I lay my hand on my mouth.
5 I have spoken once, and I will not answer;
twice, but I will proceed no further.”

After some more questions from God, Job responds once again: (Job 42:2-3)
“I know that you can do all things,
and that no purpose of yours can be thwarted.
… I have uttered what I did not understand,
things too wonderful for me, which I did not know.

Wisdom is submission to God. Job did not receive answers to his questions. He still did not understand why his children and wealth and health had been taken away from him, but he knew who God was and knew his place in relationship to God was to be silent and submissive.

Mark Twain is credited with saying, “It is better to keep your mouth closed and let people think you are a fool than to open it and remove all doubt.” He may have written this after reading Proverbs 17:28
Even a fool who keeps silent is considered wise;
when he closes his lips, he is deemed intelligent.

There is wisdom in submission and silence. Wisdom is a recognition of who God is and knowing our place before him.

What does perseverance without wisdom look like?

There are a lot of ways people respond to trials. There is a narcissistic approach that sees only me and my problems. This type of person is filled with self-pity. Why is this happening to me? What did I ever do to deserve this? I’m a good person, why should I have to suffer? Whining and complaining mark this kind of person. They view themselves as innocent victims who are unjustly suffering and want the world to focus its pity on them.

Some people respond to trials by becoming angry. This anger can be expressed outwardly and so some people become abusive and strike out at others. They are angry and irritated and unwilling to suffer alone. They blame others for their situation. Everything and everyone becomes an irritation.

Others take the anger and turn it inwards, becoming sullen and depressed, lethargic and apathetic.

None of these are wise responses to trials. All of these are acts of defiance toward God and an unwillingness to submit to him.

What does perseverance look like when wisdom is present?

Paul wrote in II Corinthians about his thorn in the flesh. Scholars speculate about what that might be. There are some hints that it might have been a problem with his eyes. But whatever it was, it was a trial he faced over a long period of time. He pleaded with Jesus three times to take it away but Jesus did not.

Paul did not say how he handled his thorn in the flesh, but I can imagine he was discouraged that Jesus did not heal him. As time passed by and people around him were being healed, he probably asked why he was not healed. Over the passing of time I imagine he felt the human emotions we feel when things do not go our way. So he might have indulged in self-pity, “Lord, I am working so hard for you, why do you not do this little thing for me?” Maybe he got angry and kicked or threw a pot. What we do know is how he eventually came out in his struggle against his thorn in the flesh.

2 Corinthians 12:7–10
So to keep me from becoming conceited because of the surpassing greatness of the revelations, a thorn was given me in the flesh, a messenger of Satan to harass me, to keep me from becoming conceited. 8 Three times I pleaded with the Lord about this, that it should leave me. 9 But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me. 10 For the sake of Christ, then, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities. For when I am weak, then I am strong.

Paul submitted to God. It is not that he quit praying about it. It is not that he settled into complacency with this ailment. But he submitted and he was given the wisdom that perhaps God was using this thorn in the flesh for good purposes. With Paul’s enormous intelligence and charisma and spiritual power and authority, it would have been easy for Paul to become impressed with himself. He could have begun to take glory to himself and accept some of the praise from others rather than deflecting it to God. But Paul came to realize this thorn in the flesh was given to him to prevent him from becoming conceited. This response reveals great wisdom in Paul and allowed him to continue to be used by God to do great things for the kingdom of God.

Wisdom believes that suffering will lead to something better, that there is meaning in the suffering. Wisdom understands that our goal is not an earthly paradise but a heavenly one. Wisdom knows that we are passing through this world as we prepare for our real home.

Perseverance without wisdom is a path that leads to death. Perseverance with wisdom is a path that leads to life. Consider it joy when you face trials of any kind and perservere, but persevere with wisdom and take the path to life.

James writes:
If any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask God, who gives generously to all without reproach, and it will be given him.

So do you need wisdom? Just pray to God, ask for wisdom and it will be given to you. Is that the teaching of James? If this is true, why don’t more people have wisdom?

But this cannot be what James means. Wisdom does not come just by asking for it; it takes time to receive wisdom.

In a book about the Amish communities in the US (the Amish are a community of people who have largely separated themselves and resist the technology and culture of the world around them), the author made the point that in a world where technology develops rapidly, the elderly are not respected because they do not hold the information that is needed to be successful. But in a world where technology develops slowly, like the Amish who do not use tractors but still plow their fields with horses, the elderly are respected because the knowledge they hold is needed to be successful.

What the younger generations in cultures where technology develops rapidly miss is that while the elderly may not know how to operate a computer, they do hold the wisdom that has come with their years and this wisdom is needed if life is to be lived well. The success of life can be very shallow if there is not wisdom to go along with it.

My point is that wisdom comes with experience, with time, not by simply asking for it.

In order to consider it joy when trials come, we need to persevere with wisdom and now James introduces another element that must come along with wisdom if we are to persevere and grow in faith.
5 If any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask God, who gives generously to all without reproach, and it will be given him. 6 But let him ask in faith, with no doubting, for the one who doubts is like a wave of the sea that is driven and tossed by the wind. 7 For that person must not suppose that he will receive anything from the Lord; 8 he is a double-minded man, unstable in all his ways.

Because people take these verses from James out of context, this text is used to support a teaching that when praying for healing, anyone who doubts must leave the room or the healing will not take place. This is a terrible teaching on many points but I don’t have time to address that here. All I will say is that this is not what James means in this text.

This teaching is firmly linked to his discussion of persevering in the midst of trials. But before we can see how this teaching about doubting relates to his theme of persevering when trials come, we need to understand what James means by using the word doubt?

What he does not mean is what we think when we hear the word doubt. We hear doubt and think it means we don’t know for sure that God exists, or don’t believe God loves us or that God can help us. How do we know this is not what James means? For one thing, in the next chapter James holds up Abraham as a model of a righteous man, a great man of faith. Certainly Abraham is one who persevered through trials with wisdom. And yet Abraham is a man who doubted.

Abraham was promised by God that he would be the father of many and yet he had no sons. After some years of frustration, Abraham took matters into his own hand and had a son through the maid of his wife, Ishmael. When Ishmael was thirteen years old, God appeared to Abraham and told him Ishmael was not the promised son and that he would have a son with his wife Sarah. Did Abraham believe what God told him? No. He laughed because he was 100 years old and Sarah was 90 years old. He was, what the writer of Hebrews describes, as good as dead and he knew it. So he laughed at the thought of he and Sarah having a son at their age.

Abraham doubted what God promised to him, but James still viewed him as righteous, a model for us all.

What James is talking about is doubting in the midst of perseverance. To see what James means by doubt, we look to verse 8 where James says that a man who doubts is double-minded, unstable in all his ways. This double-minded man is the definition of what James means by doubting.

We lived next to a watershed preserve when we were in the US and at the educational center they had a display of some of the creatures to be found in the watershed. One of these was a turtle they had discovered in a pond that had two heads. This turtle was not able to survive because each head saw food and tried to go after it – which led to it not being able to go anywhere.

What James says we need, when we ask in faith for wisdom, is a perseverance that moves forward without being distracted by all the alternatives. We need to be single-minded, having one goal, going in one direction.

Jesus taught about a double-minded person. (Matthew 6:24)
No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and money.

Jesus said you have to choose one or the other; you cannot pursue both.

John wrote in (1 John 2:15–17)
Do not love the world or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. 16 For all that is in the world—the desires of the flesh and the desires of the eyes and pride of life—is not from the Father but is from the world. 17 And the world is passing away along with its desires, but whoever does the will of God abides forever.

Since the world is passing away, John exhorts us to let go of our pursuit of the world and choose God who will take us with him into forever.

James teaches that we need to persevere with wisdom and focus. Wisdom tells us what is important and helps us set our goals. Being single-minded concentrates our energy and attention to pursue what wisdom has revealed to us.

I know people who have great wealth and go to church. Some of these are single-minded and persevere with faith and wisdom. But others are caught up in the struggle between the riches of the world and a faith that calls them to come deeper. They cannot obey the call because the pull of the world’s riches is too strong. The result is they live a very superficial Christian life, skimming the surface. They can have very strong opinions about what we should and should not do as Christians, but there is a noticeable lack of depth in their faith. Their problem is that they cannot go deep in their relationship with Jesus because they are double-minded, torn between the world and God.

You don’t have to be rich to be double-minded. Lust for what the world offers is just as powerful when you don’t have riches as it is when you do have riches.

Being double-minded is a dangerous position for a follower of Jesus. James says a person who is driven and tossed by the wind must not suppose that he will receive anything from the Lord. This is, in part, because such a person does not really desire to know Jesus. Jesus is a hobby, not a passion.

This is James’ teaching. We are to consider it joy when trials come because when we persevere, they will grow our faith, making us complete. To do this we need wisdom so we will be able to hold on to Jesus. And when we ask for wisdom, we need to be single-mindedly focused on the goals wisdom reveals to us.

Jesus’ teaching in Matthew 18:8–9 shows just how radical he expects us to be about our focus on his kingdom.
if your hand or your foot causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away. It is better for you to enter life crippled or lame than with two hands or two feet to be thrown into the eternal fire. 9 And if your eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away. It is better for you to enter life with one eye than with two eyes to be thrown into the hell of fire.

This was applied literally by some early saints of the church who struggled with lust. We are not called to cut off body parts but the strong image of Jesus’ teaching tells us how seriously we are to take our faith. We may view it as a choice. Jesus and Paul and James viewed it as a matter of life and death.

We live in the world and are supposed to enjoy what God has provided for us. We are supposed to give thanks for all the good things we receive. But we are to long only for heaven. As soon as we begin to long for the things of this world, we are in trouble and become like the two-headed turtle.

You can serve God or this world, you cannot do both. Being human we will struggle. All of us, to some extent or another, are double-minded, but James sets out the goal for us. We want to be single-minded, not distracted by the lure of the world and its possessions. Our experience of Jesus will be limited to the extent that we are pursuing the world and its rewards.

How do you know if you are being double-minded? Is there some way of testing yourself?

In John Ortberg’s book, The Me I Want to Be, he writes about being asked the question: “’How is your spiritual life going?’” This is how he responds:

I used to answer this question by looking at the state of my devotional activities: Did I pray and read the Bible enough today? The problem is that by this measure the Pharisees always win. People can be very disciplined, but remain proud and spiteful. How do we measure spiritual growth so that the Pharisees don’t win?

I asked a wise man, “How do you assess the well-being of your soul?” He immediately said, “I ask myself two questions”:

* Am I growing more easily discouraged these days?
* Am I growing more easily irritated these days?

At the core of a flourishing soul are the love of God and the peace of God. If peace is growing in me, I am less easily discouraged. If love is growing, I am less easily irritated. It was a brilliantly helpful diagnostic to assess the health of my soul.

The wise man Ortberg talked to was Dallas Willard.

I have to say that this test makes me very uncomfortable because I see how much I am caught up in the world. I am too easily discouraged and too easily irritated. My soul is not flourishing. The love of God and the peace of God are far too weak in me. I need to be more single-minded in my walk with Jesus. I need to give up my attachment to the world and long only for Jesus and his kingdom.

If I am going to be able to consider it joy when trials come, I will need to have perseverance grounded in God’s wisdom and a single-minded determination to follow Jesus no matter what happens.

How do you do in the test Ortberg talked about? Are you growing more easily discouraged these days? Are you growing more easily irritated these days?

Maybe what we need is more trials. I hate saying this, but it is trials that shape us and help us to focus. When I look at my life and see my strong attachment to this world, I wonder what it would take to break that off. I know if I had terminal cancer and had just three months to live, I would break off that attachment. But I face a possible thirty more years of life. How will I be able to stop holding on to the rewards of this world?

I need and we need a stronger, more intimate relationship with Jesus. We need a powerful experience of his love and his peace. We can take confidence that as we move through the years of our life, God, who loves us, will be present with us. The Holy Spirit will work with us to help us break off our worldly attachment. We will grow in wisdom and the trials that come our way will help us focus more single-mindedly on what has eternal significance. Our faith will grow.

So make good choices. Do not despair. Do not give up. And when trials come, you will be able to see, as Paul did with his thorn in the flesh, how God is using them to grow your faith.

Sometimes, in the first couple sentences of a book, you can tell if reading it would be a waste of time. If you are reading about taking walks in the forest and the first sentence is: “If you see a snake, pick it up by its tail and see if it is poisonous,” you know this book is no good and you will put it down. If you read a book about dieting and it begins by saying a healthy diet includes lots of candy and soda, that too is a book to put down.

So when you pick up the Bible and read in the second verse of James,
Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds,
put it down. What is James, a masochist? Enjoy pain? Enjoy difficult times? Nonsense!

I know I don’t. When I am sick, as I was in Thailand, and I lie in bed day and night with a head that hurts and constant coughing and blowing my nose, being tired but not being able to sleep, joy is not remotely near to me. I complain and wonder why God is allowing me to suffer and think about how it would be to suffer like this until the day I die.

The presence of suffering in a world created by God has been a problem for a long time. Two thousand, five hundred years ago, the book of Job was written to consider the problem of suffering in this God-created world. If God is good, then why do bad things happen? If God loves me, why do I suffer? Does God not care? Is he perhaps preoccupied with other more important things?

Rabbi Kushner wrote a book that was very popular in the US, When Bad Things Happen to Good People. As a young theology student Kushner tried to understand the Book of Job. He counseled people in his synagogue who went through experiences of pain and grief, but it was not until he learned that his three-year-old son, Aaron, would die in his early teens of a rare disease, that he had to really face the issue of suffering. Where was a loving God in the presence of suffering?

Millions of people have resonated with his perspective. A man whose wife died at the age of 28, a man whose brother was murdered, those who faced unbearable loss wrote letters to Rabbi Kushner thanking him for his book.

There is a lot of wisdom and good counsel and insight in Kushner’s book, but his solution to the problem of suffering is that while God is good and loving, he does not have the power to intercede. God is a silent spectator to the suffering in the world. God would intercede if he could, but he cannot.

This is not at all helpful to me. God is the pre-existing, creator God who has all power. To deny his power in order to understand the presence of suffering is not an acceptable solution to the problem. But why then, do we suffer?

The suffering we face in the world is a huge issue for us. One of the students who attended our church some years ago came to Morocco and became a follower of Jesus, after having been raised in a Muslim family. While she was here, her fiancee broke up with her and two of her brothers died and she wondered if this was punishment for her conversion. Why had God allowed this to happen to her?

Phil Yancy received many letters after writing his book, Where Is God When It Hurts? In his next book, Disappointment with God, he wrote about some of these.

A young mother wrote that her joy had turned to bitterness and grief when she delivered a daughter with spina bifida, a birth defect that leaves the spinal cord exposed. In page after page of tiny, spidery script she recounted how medical bills had soaked up the family savings and how her marriage had cracked apart as her husband came to resent all the time she devoted to their sick child. As her life crumbled around her, she was beginning to doubt what she had once believed about a loving God.

A young woman wrote, with some embarrassment, about her ongoing depression. She has no reason to be depressed, she said. She is healthy, earns a good salary, and has a stable family background. Yet most days when she wakes up she cannot think of a single reason to go on living. She no longer cares about life or God, and when she prays, she wonders if anyone is really listening.

In the years I worked with my father in business, I sometime went to activities at their Unitarian Church, a church that accepts almost every belief except the deity of Jesus. About half the people I met in my parents’ church were there because they had experienced the death of someone in the family or a divorce or some tragic event. They had been raised in a Christian church but their suffering did not match what they expected from the teaching of their church. So they rejected Jesus and joined the Unitarian Church which keeps the form of church but discards the Christian theology of a church.

Many people suffer in one way or another and face a huge loss and then come to the conclusion that God must not after all be a loving God and so they leave the church, leave the faith in which they were raised.

But amazingly, there are other stories of suffering in which other choices are made. I talked in the last couple weeks with someone who told me of a friend who had cancer. This friend went through the pain and suffering of operations and chemotherepy and yet she said she was glad she had cancer. In fact, she said, if she could go back in time, she would chose to have the cancer. This woman’s daughter was horrified by what her mother said, but the woman had experienced an intimacy with God through her ordeal that far eclipsed the pain and suffering she endured and she valued that more than her life itself.

I have read about a man who developed leprosy and through this came to faith in Jesus. He said he was grateful for the leprosy because it helped him to know Jesus. I would guess that you have heard stories like this yourself.

There are many responses to suffering and the ones when people say they are glad they got cancer or leprosy because through that they found Jesus make the least sense. We can understand when someone is bitter because they or someone they loved suffered. But when someone embraces the suffering and says they would choose it because of where it led them, we have to sit up and pay attention because this is something unusual.

And in fact it is miraculous because it is an intrusion of God into our world. When someone responds to suffering by choosing to draw closer to God, the Kingdom of God has pushed back the kingdom of this world. This is a miracle on par with the blind seeing or the lame walking.

The world demands that we resent suffering and when we choose otherwise, it is clear God is at work.

What is most disturbing about suffering is that this is how God has designed us to grow in faith. It would be one thing if God worked to push suffering away from us and made it a very occasional experience, but it is almost as if God embraces the suffering and uses it for a good purpose, to grow our faith. This does not mean that God delights when we suffer. This does not mean that God creates suffering or inflicts suffering on us or causes us to suffer. But God knows that living in this fallen world will bring suffering and he uses this for his purposes.

What did Paul say in Romans 8:28?
And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose.

God does not cause suffering but he is able to take the evil of suffering and use it for good purposes. The good that comes out of suffering is far better than the evil of suffering itself. How does he use suffering to make something good come out of it?

When we die, we take nothing from this world with us except the faith that developed in us during our years on earth. This makes faith the most precious commodity we have and we grow in faith through suffering. We don’t grow by eating a delicious meal (well, we do grow, but not the kind of growth we are talking about). We don’t grow by enjoying wonderful evenings with friends, relaxing walks in the park or even by having wonderful church services with good worship and preaching. We grow through suffering.

Jesus said in John 16:33
In the world you will have tribulation. But take heart; I have overcome the world.

He did not say we might have tribulation, he said we will have tribulation.

Paul taught in Lystra that (Acts 14:22)
through many tribulations we must enter the kingdom of God.

It is not through many pleasures or comforts but through many tribulations that we enter the kingdom of God.

The writer of Hebrews wrote to Jewish followers of Jesus who were being persecuted and said: (Hebrews 12:5–11)
And have you forgotten the exhortation that addresses you as sons?
“My son, do not regard lightly the discipline of the Lord,
nor be weary when reproved by him.
6 For the Lord disciplines the one he loves,
and chastises every son whom he receives.”
7 It is for discipline that you have to endure. God is treating you as sons. For what son is there whom his father does not discipline? 8 If you are left without discipline, in which all have participated, then you are illegitimate children and not sons. 9 Besides this, we have had earthly fathers who disciplined us and we respected them. Shall we not much more be subject to the Father of spirits and live? 10 For they disciplined us for a short time as it seemed best to them, but he disciplines us for our good, that we may share his holiness. 11 For the moment all discipline seems painful rather than pleasant, but later it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it.

If we sit back and reflect, we can tell from our own experience that this is true. I mentioned last week that while 2010 was probably the worst year of my life with the deportations of the parents of the children at the Village of Hope, from an eternal perspective this was a good year because my faith went deep and held on to Jesus despite not seeing how good will come from the cruel separation of parents and children.

I wish it were otherwise. I really wish it were otherwise, but it is not. We cannot live an easy life and grow in faith, it just does not happen that way.

James wrote:
Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds, 3 for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness. 4 And let steadfastness have its full effect, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing.

We do not count it all joy because we like pain. We count it all joy because of what it does for us. The testing of our faith produces steadfastness.

Here is where choice comes into it. Two people can face the same trial and react differently. Perhaps the trial is parents who have to deal with the murder of their child. In the midst of grief and questioning a choice has to be made: will I hold on to Jesus? One person will reject Jesus because God has failed them in allowing this tragic murder. A second person will hold on to Jesus despite not understanding how something like this could happen.

The day after the parents of the children at the Village of Hope were taken away, I drove with Elliot up to Tangiers to talk with a student. When we stopped to get something to eat, I said I would pray and then could not. When I pray before a meal, it is a prayer of trust in God to provide for all I need. My faith was so crushed by the events at the Village of Hope that I could not pray. I didn’t know how I was going to be able to continue to preach at RIC. My faith was devastated. But what made a difference in that day and in that year is that despite my not understanding and despite my pain and anger at what had happened I refused to let go. I clung to Jesus and that made all the difference.

When I sent out my newsletter to friends and supporters of my ministry in Morocco, three people wrote to say that it seemed my faith had grown. I wrote back saying that if it had, it was not intentional. I was drowning and all I did was hold on to Jesus. But when we hold on to Jesus in painful times, we grow in faith.

When our faith is tested and we hold on, refusing to let go despite the pain, our faith produces steadfastness. And this determination to hold on, not to be moved or shaken from our faith has a positive effect.
And let steadfastness have its full effect, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing.

I mentioned last week that we are made for eternity, not for this world. This world prepares us for our eternal home and the trials we encounter in our lives produce in us, if we allow them to, the complete wholeness God wants us to have. The trials we face prepare us for our heavenly existence.

This is a great truth, a difficult truth, but a great truth. But it is one each person has to discover for themself. If you are suffering a great loss and I come up to you and tell you, “Consider it all joy because God is building your faith,” I should expect you to hit me in the mouth.

In a review of Rabbi Kushner’s book, one person wrote:
When I faced incredible loss a few years ago, I was amazed at the insensitive words my so-called friends offered in their “compassion”, words that cut me right to the bone of my soul. It seemed that my grief was a burden for many. I painfully watched many of my closest friends distance themselves from me and even resent me for the tragedy and emotion that I had no control over. I questioned my feelings, my thoughts, and even my faith.

This book is a comfort for all people who have been forced to swallow such stupid sentiments in their times of grief and loss. It is an exploration of how we comfort each other in such terrifying times, and the dumb mistakes we make. Most of these sentiments wax on about God, why He created a world in which such pain exists: Is this all part of a greater good, a higher order? Is God testing you, expanding your soul for your own good? Has He taken your loved ones to a better place? This book gets right to the heart of the matter, that people in fact say such things as disguised justification for their own lack of understanding. They say things in defense of God to keep their world in order and the senseless tragedy in your life out of theirs. For example, someone might tell you, “God gave this grief to you as a test, because He loved you so very much, and knew you would become a better person for it,” (to which the author replies, “If only I had been a weaker person, my daughter would still be alive.”)

The person who wrote this review is right to criticize the way people responded to his or her suffering, but that does not mean what they said is untrue.

James 1:2-4 should never be quoted to someone who is suffering. The best thing to say to someone who is suffering is nothing except maybe, “I am so sorry.” Being present is the best gift when someone suffers. It is up to each person to choose to apply James 1:2-4 to themselves.

I’m not sure at the point of suffering that anyone can choose to be thankful and consider it all joy. But we can choose to hold on to Jesus and after the fact, we can realize that the trial was a blessing in disguise.

Let me add a point of clarification. What suffering is James writing about? Does what he wrote apply to all suffering in life?

What if I rob a bank and go to jail? Is my sitting in prison part of the suffering that God will use to build my faith and make me complete in all things? Should I consider it joy that I am in prison because God is growing my faith? What if I come to Morocco illegally and can’t find work or money for food and rent? Is that part of the suffering James talks about? What about the son in the parable Jesus told who demanded his share of the inheritance and then wasted it in wild and reckless living and ended up sitting with the pigs, eating their food? Was his suffering what James talks about?

There is a difference between suffering that is a consequence of my own bad choices and suffering that comes to me on its own. When I suffer because of bad choices I have made, the redemptive part of this suffering is that I can come to my senses and return home to my father in heaven, as the prodigal son in Jesus’ parable came home to his father. Suffering because of my bad choices can lead me to repent and give my life to Jesus or return to a life lived in obedience to Jesus. This is what Paul calls justification, the first stage of salvation.

Suffering that builds my faith, the kind of suffering James is talking about, is suffering that happens to me, not the consequence of my bad choices in life. This suffering is used by the Holy Spirit to transform me, make me more holy, to grow my faith. This is what Paul calls sanctification, the second stage of salvation.

It is important to recognize the difference. We need to be in a relationship with Jesus before the redemptive work of building our faith can begin. We need to cling to Jesus. Then we can grow in faith.

The writer of this letter is James, identified as the younger half-brother of Jesus. James knew Jesus better than almost anyone in the New Testament. He slept in the same bed as Jesus. He played with Jesus, did chores with Jesus, learned carpentry from his father, just like Jesus did. Like most younger brothers, he watched and wanted to be like his older brother who seemed to be able to do everything better than he could.

All this familiarity created problems and when Jesus set out on his public ministry, James was now a grown man and most likely had a family of his own. His older brother, Jesus, had not gotten married. He had defied the cultural expectations for himself and then he set out on his public ministry. James and the rest of his family thought he had gone mad. They tried to bring him home and let him come to his senses. James mocked his brother, daring him to go to Jerusalem even though the religious leaders were trying to kill him.

James was not at all one of the admirers of Jesus’ teaching and ministry.
Then Jesus died. We don’t know how James reacted but after his resurrection,  Jesus appeared to him and his life turned around. We don’t know what happened to him in the next five to ten years but by the time we read about him in Acts, he is the leader of the church in Jerusalem. The disciples spent three years with Jesus while James mocked him from a distance, but now he was recognized by the disciples as the leader of the church in Jerusalem. Something very powerful must have happened to him to put him in this position.

We know from church tradition that he was given the nickname, camel knees, because he prayed so much on his knees. Paul’s life turned around in dramatic fashion after Jesus appeared to him in the noonday sun on the road to Damascus but the appearance of Jesus to James after his resurrection must have been an equally powerful experience.

We don’t know what suffering James experienced over the years after Jesus appeared to him, but these were years when the early followers of Jesus were persecuted and to escape the persecution, the followers of Jesus scattered into Judea and Samaria. This is the audience James addresses in the opening of his letter.
James, a servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ,
To the twelve tribes in the Dispersion:
Greetings.

We don’t know the suffering James endured, but the wisdom he displays with his opening words indicates he did suffer and that he persevered through the suffering and grew in his faith. James wrote out of his own experience.

We will be working our way through his letter over the Sundays between now and the beginning of Lent and then pick up this letter again next January.

This is a letter for you. You have suffered in the past, you may be suffering now and you will suffer in the future. That sounds terribly discouraging, but from the perspective of James, this is good news because it means you will have a choice to make. You can choose to persevere and take the path to life or you can choose to focus on the injustice of your pain and take the path to death.

The reward for choosing well has a long-term payoff.  (James 1:12)
Blessed is the man who remains steadfast under trial, for when he has stood the test he will receive the crown of life, which God has promised to those who love him.

But it also has a short-term payoff.

I have known people who chose to remain bitter and angry because of suffering and life closed in around them. Sometimes marriages break up because the couple cannot take the strain of the pain they experience. One woman I knew never recovered from her son’s death and kept his room as a temple, exactly the way it was when he died. Her whole life was stalled and she was unable to move into the future.

When we hold on to the injustice and pain of suffering, our whole life is affected. Holding on cripples us to some extent. It really is a path to death.

But when we hold on to Jesus, there comes healing and hope and we are able to move forward with an openess to what will come.

Watchman Nee, who died in prison in 1972,  was a leader in the church in China who suffered greatly in his work to build the church in that country. He wrote this:
The breaking of the alabaster box and the anointing of the Lord filled the house with the odor, with the sweetest odor. Everyone could smell it. Whenever you meet someone who has really suffered; been limited, gone through things for the Lord, willing to be imprisoned by the Lord, just being satisfied with Him and nothing else, immediately you sense the fragrance. There is a savor of the Lord. Something has been crushed, something has been broken, and there is a resulting odor of sweetness.

There is a beauty and a sweetness to those who have held on to Jesus throughout their lives.

You are loved by God. Because he loves you he wants you to grow in faith so you will come into his eternal kingdom with the sweet aroma of faith, the riches of heaven. So when you face trials of any kind, look to Jesus. If you need to come home, come home to Jesus and cling to him. If you are living in an obedient relationship with Jesus and you suffer in any way, cling to Jesus. Refuse to let go. Hold on and your steadfastness will grow your faith, making you lacking in nothing.

If you were sitting here at RIC one year ago, which of the events of 2011 would you have predicted? There had already been two weeks of demonstrations in Tunisia, but would you have predicted there would be a regime change in not only Tunisia, but also Egypt and Libya? Or would you have predicted that Syria, Yemen and Bahrain would have large demonstrations, shaking those regimes? There was even unrest in Saudi Arabia and here in Morocco that caused the leaders of these countries to dramatically increase subsidies and make other changes to forestall large demonstrations. Who would have guessed?

Would you have predicted the deaths of Osama bin Laden, Muammar Gaddafi and Kim Jong-il?

You might have predicted there would be earthquakes. This is always a safe prediction. But the March 11 earthquake and tsunami in Japan was not predictable. There were 155 earthquakes in 2011 greater than a magnitude of 6.0. Nineteen of these were of a magnitude greater than 7.0. The biggest, of course, was the 9.0 in Japan in March. Our students from Fiji may remember the 7.3 earthquake in September.

As we move into 2012, what will be the major news events of this coming year? There will certainly be more earthquakes, but when and where?  (This morning Japan had a 7.0 earthquake, the first big one of the year.) The effects of global warming are making themselves felt with flooding and drought and famine. In 2011 Thailand had its worst flooding in 60 years. The Phillippines have been hit hard by storms with an estimated 1,500 people killed by the flooding. East Africa is again caught up in a drought and with the political climate, is causing the deaths of an estimated 750,000 people. Where will the hardest hit parts of the world be in 2012?

The financial markets in the world are in a precarious position as the European Union is being threatened by countries unable to control their spending. The United States is also in a dangerous position as the Congress and the people seem unable and unwilling to reduce spending and raise taxes. This threatens to produce a prolonged, world-wide recession. Will the world economy improve or degrade in 2012?

Churches in Nigeria were bombed on Christmas Day. Will there be a resurgence of terrorism this coming year?

There is a new leader in North Korea and the world is uncertain about who will be in power. Pakistan is increasingly belligerent. As countries with nuclear weapons transition, the uncertainty of how their nuclear technology will be used is unsettling. Iran is moving forward with the development of nuclear technology and with a president who has a goal of setting off a nuclear apocalypse, that is just a bit disturbing. Will this year bring an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities?

Iran is threatening to cut off the supply of 1/6 of the world’s oil that passes through the Strait of Hormuz. If there is a serious disruption to the world’s oil supply, one consequence will be that world food prices will rise and this will lead to riots around the world.

The US has largely pulled out of Iraq and that country is already disintegrating into Sunni/Shiite conflict. In fact, tensions between Sunnis and Shiites are creating much of the tension in the Gulf states and the Middle East.

This past year, Oti Kingsley, a Gahanian student in our church, died in January. He was a bright young man, well liked. His death came as a real shock to us. Will we be shocked by the death of someone in our church community this year? I hope not.

I would love to predict that 2012 will be a year of peace with no major disasters and no wars, no conflicts and no deaths, but that is just not going to happen.

I talked with a couple people whose walk with Jesus I very much respect and was surprised to hear them tell me that they approach 2012 with fear. It is not that they fear any one thing, but that they fear the unknowable.

At the end of our service we will sing Blessed Be Your Name which has the chorus:
You give and take away
You give and take away
My heart will choose to say
Lord blessed be your name.

That is not easy for all of us to sing because the song embraces both the good and the bad. We are happy to embrace the good but want to keep our distance from the bad. But I love this song because it speaks such powerful truth. It stands against those who want to hear nothing but positive news and proclaims God’s love and sovereignty even when the news is tragic. It is a song of unshakeable faith.

I could stand here this morning and tell you 2012 will be a year of unprecedented blessing and encourage you to look forward to a year with only good news, but that does not reflect the reality of the world. I want you to look forward to 2012 with a firm grasp on reality, not a superficial hold on wishful thinking.

I do believe we can look forward to this year and that we can look forward to great blessing in our lives in this coming year. How do we enter into 2012 without fear?

The uncertainty of the future is obviously not something new, so this morning I want to look at Joseph, the husband of Mary and father of Jesus. As he looked across the road in Nazareth and saw the young teenage Mary walking along, he wanted to move into the future with her as his wife. He had no idea what he was getting into.

The two sets of parents met and agreed to the marriage and negotiated the price to be paid to Mary’s father. Then a public announcement was made. At this point Mary and Joseph were pledged, betrothed. This is a bit like a modern engagement, except that it was much more binding. The betrothal could be broken only by death or divorce. Sexual relations were not yet permitted. For one year, Mary and Joseph were expected to live separately, each with their own families. This waiting period would demonstrate Mary’s purity. If it was discovered she was pregnant during this time, the marriage could be annulled. At the end of the year, then they could be married and begin living together.

But then Mary had her visitation from Gabriel and her world turned upside down. She apparently did not tell anyone about this but went to spend three months with her cousin Elizabeth. When she came back Matthew says, (Matthew 1:18)
she was found to be with child from the Holy Spirit.

A majority of women begin to show at three to four months of pregnancy. Mary was probably past her morning sickness, if she had that, so when she returned to Nazareth, three to four months pregnant, with the loose fitting clothes she likely wore, I don’t think it was obvious as she walked through the streets of Nazareth that she was pregnant. But then maybe her mother  saw her in the house when she was wearing less clothing and noticed the little bump.

This was a serious problem. It brought shame to Mary’s family and meant she would be rejected by Joseph. The marriage would be annulled. The law said the penalty for her unchastity was death by stoning, although this was rare at the time.

How did Joseph find out about this? Perhaps Mary’s parents went to tell Joseph’s parents. It was not a secret that was going to stay hidden so it was better to deal with it sooner rather than later.

We skim over this story but the emotional pain of the discovery that Mary was pregnant must have been enormous. Mary’s world turned upside down when Gabriel came to her, but the world of her family and Joseph and his family also turned upside down with this discovery.

When God searched for a mother for Jesus, he searched also for a father for Jesus. There may have been other women who would have been a good mother for Jesus, but they were not betrothed to a man like Joseph. God chose Mary and Joseph to be the parents for Jesus and the character of Joseph is revealed in his response to the news of Mary’s pregnancy.

And her husband Joseph, being a just man and unwilling to put her to shame, resolved to divorce her quietly.

Marrying her was out of the question. He had no idea who she had met or how it had happened, but she had been unfaithful to him, as hard as that was to believe.

Did Mary tell anyone about the visitation of Gabriel?

If she had, what would they have thought? I go back and forth on this. Did she tell her parents? She had told her cousin Elizabeth so maybe she did tell her parents. Did she tell Joseph? Was she even alone with him so she could tell him, or was she always in the presence of her parents and his parents? If she did tell them, they must have thought she was crazy or an inventor of very creative lies to cover her deceit.

At any rate, while Joseph was considering how to divorce her quietly,
behold, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream, saying, “Joseph, son of David, do not fear to take Mary as your wife, for that which is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. 21 She will bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.”

Joseph had a choice. Even with this dream, the easiest thing to do would be to divorce Mary quietly and get on with his life. There would be no scandal associated with him. He had been honorable. He would still be able to make a good marriage and have a good life.

But Joseph was an exceptional man and stepped into an uncertain future. He took upon himself the scandal of Mary’s pregnancy. A year had not passed, and when they married, everyone would know something was wrong. The people of Nazareth would probably assume that Mary and Joseph had not been able to resist the temptation to have sexual relations and so had to get married early. Joseph, as well as Mary would no longer be viewed as an honorable man.

Joseph took the more difficult path and he did it because he had heard from the angel. He knew this was the right thing to do and he was willing to step into what the future would bring.

Then Mary and Joseph went to Bethlehem where she gave birth. We know this story. Time passed, perhaps a year, and by then they were living in a house when the wise men came with their gifts. Herod had used the wise men to find a potential threat to his throne and when the wise men did not return, he began making plans to kill all the baby boys in Bethlehem under the age of two.

Joseph and Mary knew none of this. After Jesus was born, they began to find a way to make a living. Perhaps they did not want to go back to Nazareth and face the scandal of an early marriage and birth. Maybe Joseph began to use his skills as a carpenter. They made new friends, people who did not know their betrothal history. Maybe they decided this would be a good place to live.

But then came the wise men and Joseph had a second dream. (Matthew 2:13–15)
Now when they had departed, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream and said, “Rise, take the child and his mother, and flee to Egypt, and remain there until I tell you, for Herod is about to search for the child, to destroy him.” 14 And he rose and took the child and his mother by night and departed to Egypt 15 and remained there until the death of Herod.

Joseph found he and his family in a dangerous present with a very uncertain future. He acted immediately and gathered their few things and fled. The expensive gifts were undoubtedly quite helpful as they traveled to Egypt and made a new life there, but this was still a difficult journey that lasted about two weeks.

Joseph saw the young teenage Mary walking the streets of Nazareth and wanted her to be part of his future. He did not know he would have to take on her shame and flee from the king who wanted to kill his newborn son. Would he have pursued marriage with Mary if he had known what the future would bring? I don’t think so.

In one of the Puritan prayers we read this morning, there is a line:
I thank you that you have veiled my eyes to the waters ahead.

There is grace in that. A knowledge of the future events in our lives might be unbearable. It is fortunate that we do not know the future. We move forward, trusting that God will help us face whatever comes.

In the second Puritan prayer in our service this morning, which we will read after taking communion, there is this line:
I launch my vessel on the unknown waters of this year,
with you, O Father, as my harbor,
you, O Son, as my helm,
you, O Holy Spirit, filling my sails.

We head into 2012 without knowing what will happen. There is grace in this. But we move forward with God’s presence. So I believe we can head into 2012 and whatever it brings with confidence and assurance. We do not need to fear what will come. And we can learn three lessons from Joseph that will help us with this.

First, Joseph was directed by God.

God entered into humanity in the fragile form of a baby. There were so many threats to the life of this new baby of which the least expected was the murderous actions of Herod. But God was not going to allow his purposes to be thwarted. He sent an angel to speak to Joseph to preserve the life of Jesus.

This has been the ongoing action of God throughout the ages. He speaks to men and women, girls and boys, to direct them so his purposes will be accomplished. Amidst the chaos of life, God patiently and consistently acts to direct us so people are brought into his kingdom.

Let me point out that while God directs through dreams, this is not his normal or usual way of directing us. Dreams are concentrated in the Bible in just three places: in Genesis with Joseph, in Daniel with Daniel and in Matthew with the birth of Jesus. These were extraordinary times and called for extraordinary communication.

God’s primary means of directing us comes from our reading of the Bible. This does not rule out God speaking to us in dreams, but that will be exceptional, not usual. We can also be led by the still small voice of the Holy Spirit, by circumstances, by the wise counsel of friends and through the common sense God gave us. But God does and will direct us into the path he knows is best for us.

God will direct you in 2012. He has a path for you to take and he will speak to you to help you take that path.

God directed and then secondly, Joseph listened to God. If God speaks to us but we are not listening, we will go on our merry way and miss out on what God has planned for us. We have to be in a relationship with God that includes a desire to hear him speak to us. We can keep the Bible on the shelf collecting dust. Or we can pick it up, read a few verses without really paying attention to what we read, put it down and say we have done our duty by having a devotional time. Neither of these are the action of someone who wants to hear God speak. Another way we can miss out on listening to God is to be so set on what we want out of life that we do not pay attention to what we read in the Bible or to circumstances or to the wise advice of our friends.

To listen means that we live in submission to God, always ready to hear what he has to say to us. Joseph was this kind of man.

God gave Joseph direction, he listened and then thirdly, Joseph demonstrated his obedience to what God said.

Joseph could have taken the information from the angel about Mary’s pregnancy and pushed it away, taking the easier path. But despite the cost to himself, he obeyed. When he received the dream and an angel told him to get up and flee to Egypt, he obeyed. He did not take a few days to think about it, his obedience was instantaneous.

It does us no good to listen and hear God speak to us but then be unwilling to obey because we do not like what he said.

As we enter into 2012, we can do so with confidence because God will continue to direct us, as he has done in the past. We may not receive spectacular revelations, but God will direct us. It is up to us to cultivate our relationship with God so that we are open to hear what he has to say to us. When we open the Bible to read, we need to pray and consciously state our desire to hear God speak to us. And then when we sense God’s direction, we need to be willing to obey, even if our obedience will be difficult or costly.

There is no guarantee that 2012 will be an easy year. Despite the angels speaking to Joseph, his life took some hard and difficult turns. We need to be reminded that God does not promise us an easy life. His love for us is not measured by how comfortable a life we live.

There was a lot of pain and suffering in 2011. Did God not care about those around the world who suffered? Did God not care about Oti who died in January?

Think about the parents of the baby boys in Bethlehem. Why did God not speak to their fathers and tell them to flee so the lives of those boys would have been spared? Did God care about Jesus but not about the other boys?

Of course God cares. Why else would he come to earth to die for us? His death for us is proof of his great love for us.

We have to understand that God takes the long view and wants to bring us safe into heaven with a strong faith, the only thing we take from this world when we die. What happens in the short-term, in the years of our earthly life is not nearly as important.

We need to understand that our earthly life is not all there is. We are born for eternity, not for this earthly life. But we evaluate a good life by earthly standards. If someone lives to be 90 years old and dies surrounded by children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, then we say this person lived a good life. But what makes this life better than the life of someone who dies at the age of 5?

The five year old misses out on all the experiences of this world, but as the five year old stands in eternity with Jesus, do you really think she or he will have any regrets?

Nothing can be taken away from us that we won’t eventually lose anyway. Our health, our wealth, these will all be left behind when we die. This may happen in 2012 or in 2052, it is only a question of timing.

God promises to be present with us but he has never promised that we will not suffer. In fact the Bible says we should rejoice when trials and tribulations come. (We will come to that teaching in our series of sermons from James that will begin next week.)

This life, to use the image of C. S. Lewis, is just the preface of the book of our life. When we die we begin Chapter One. This life is just a preliminary heat, a quiz, a snack. Our real life begins when we die.

We are visitors on this planet and looking forward to going home. Paul wrote about this desire in 2 Corinthians 5:1–5 (The Message)
For instance, we know that when these bodies of ours are taken down like tents and folded away, they will be replaced by resurrection bodies in heaven—God-made, not hand-made—and we’ll never have to relocate our “tents” again. Sometimes we can hardly wait to move—and so we cry out in frustration. Compared to what’s coming, living conditions around here seem like a stopover in an unfurnished shack, and we’re tired of it! We’ve been given a glimpse of the real thing, our true home, our resurrection bodies! The Spirit of God whets our appetite by giving us a taste of what’s ahead. He puts a little of heaven in our hearts so that we’ll never settle for less.

We need to live with an awareness of heaven and with a longing for our eternal state but this does not mean that our earthly life is without meaning. The joys and sorrows of this earthly life are real and valuable. They are important. But they must be viewed in light of our eternal home.

We can move into 2012 with eager anticipation because we know God will be present with us. This is his promise to us.

If 2012 proves to be a difficult year for us, we will grieve and mourn. We will feel the pain of the suffering and loss, but we will not be alone. God will be present with us. He will take us safely through 2012 and keep us safe until he brings us into his eternal kingdom.

When we submit to God and decide we will live for Jesus, then we can expect there will be blessings ahead for us in 2012. When we cling to Jesus, especially though the difficult times, he will grow our faith and we will come out of the year with a stronger faith, a deeper certainty, a brighter hope.

2010 was a very difficult year for me, perhaps the worst year of my life. The parents of the children at the Village of Hope were abruptly taken away and deported. The children have not seen the only parents they ever knew in the one year and nine months since then. My faith was shaken to the core and yet, as I look back on it, 2010 was a great year because when I clung to Jesus through all the pain and uncertainty, my faith grew. I came out of 2010 with a deeper, more profound faith and from an eternal viewpoint, that is a great blessing.

So as you enter into 2012, hold on to Jesus. No matter what, hold on to Jesus. There will be times of great joy in 2012 and if there are times of great sorrow, do not let go. Grieve, weep, express your anger and whatever other emotions you have and know Jesus is present with you. He will never leave you or forsake you. Hold on to him.

Let me read from the Puritan prayer we prayed earlier:
If you have appointed storms of tribulation, you will be with me in them;
If I have to pass through tempests of persecution and temptation, I shall not drown;
If I am to die, I shall see your face sooner;
If a painful end is to be my lot, grant me grace that my faith will not fail;
If I am to be cast aside from the life I love, I can make no stipulation;
Only glorify yourself in me whether in comfort or in trial,
as a chosen vessel suitable always for your use.

This is a great prayer of trust and submission.

We step out into 2012 with confidence because we will have the presence of God. In the words of the second Puritan prayer,

I launch my vessel on the unknown waters of this year,
with you, O Father, as my harbor,
you, O Son, as my helm,
you, O Holy Spirit, filling my sails.

This is a world filled with unjustness. What we see in the world is not the way it is supposed to be. What we see is not how it will be in our eternal home. Hold on to Jesus. He will help you in times of blessing and in times of sorrow and keep you safe all the way to your permanent home in heaven.

The origin of giving gifts at Christmas has a number of different sources. In Matthew’s gospel we read that the magi came to see Jesus in Bethlehem, about a year after he was born, with gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh. Although this is a logical precedent for giving gifts at Christmas, it does not seem to have been what motivated Christians to begin the gift-giving tradition.

One source for this tradition comes from the celebration of the Winter Solstice (December 21) in ancient Rome. During the feast of Kalends, high ranking officials were expected to give gifts to the Emperor since the Winter Solstice celebrated the birth of the Sun God, to whom the emperor was directly related.

Why does this have anything to do with Christmas? Since Christians did not know when Jesus was born (it is most likely he was born in the spring), they adopted the celebration of the Winter Solstice and some of its traditions as a way of celebrating the birth of Jesus. This began the custom of exchanging gifts.

Another early source of gift-giving comes from St. Nicholas, who was a historic 4th-century saint and Greek Bishop of Myra, part of modern-day Turkey. Because of the many miracles attributed to his intercession, he is also known as Nikolaos the Wonderworker. He had a reputation for secret gift-giving, such as putting coins in the shoes of those who left them out for him, and thus became the model for Santa Claus.

In the 1800s with the development of modern advertising, the giving of Christmas gifts shifted into high gear and today retailers in the US count on Christmas for 20% of their annual sales. Retailers love any excuse for people to come and shop so even here in Morocco there has been an increasing presence of Christmas with trees and lights and gifts over the past twelve years I have been here.

One of the best gifts I ever received was the Christmas before Annie and I were married. Annie bought twelve presents, one for each day of the twelve days of Christmas. I can’t remember them all anymore, but here are six of them. She gave me a wicker wastebasket, a novel by Saul Bellow, the game of Monopoly, a Bob Dylan album, a box of mints and a tea mug which I still use today. She knew what I liked and went out to buy these presents as an expression of her love for me. Those presents were wonderful.

One of the best presents I ever gave was for my father. When I was an infant, my father built his own house. He worked evenings after work, weekends and vacations. He worked in all the seasons of the year, even when there was snow on the ground. He did this for a couple years and never tired of talking about this experience. He was very proud that he had built this house by himself. My parents moved a couple times after this and the year before I came to Morocco, I drove to the town where my father had built his house and located it. I was writing his oral history and wanted a picture of what the house he built looked like forty years after he left. I discovered that the door knocker was still the original one he had put on the door. And it had his name written on it: John R. Wald jr.

I talked with the people who now owned the house and explained who had built their house and asked them if I could buy the door knocker. They agreed and that Christmas I gave my father the door knocker as a present, forty years after he had left his house. He was so surprised and delighted. That was a great gift.

This morning I want to give each of you a gift. The ushers will hand them out and I ask you not to open your gift until I tell you to.

Now that everyone has a gift, open it.

Some of you have a new ten dirham coin, others two new five dirham coins. These are the new coins, uncirculated, in mint condition. How do you feel receiving a gift in church? Do you like your gift? Is this a good gift? For some of you this gift will be more appreciated than for others. It is difficult to give the same gift to everyone and have everyone equally pleased.

This morning I want to talk about giving a gift, receiving a gift and then sharing a gift.

First, giving a gift. What makes a gift a good gift?

The first necessary part of giving a good gift is that you have to know the person you are giving the gift to. Giving a ten dirham coin does not show that I know you. To make a really good gift I would have to know what you like. If I gave you a soccer ball, you might be delighted and you might want to throw it at my head. The first Christmas after my brother-in-law was married, he gave my sister the romantic present of a pair of running shoes and I think she might have thrown them at his head.

The point is that we do not all have the same tastes. We do not all like wearing the same kind of clothes. We are individuals and when someone takes the time to know us and buys us a present that matches what we like, it is a great gift.

When I know you, I know what you need and what you like. One of my daughters gave me a cd of a man playing Bach on a ukelele. She knows I like unusual things. Another daughter gave me a shirt from Malaysia from a butterfly farm. It is a beautiful shirt. They know me and know how to give me a gift that I will appreciate.

Giving a good gift begins with knowing the person who will receive the gift.

The second part of giving a good gift is to give something that meets a need in the person’s life.

Once I know you, I can think about what you would enjoy. It could be something you want or something you need, but the gift needs to be directed specifically to you in a way that meets your needs.

In the marriage course Annie and I hold, there is a couple who talk about gift giving as a love language. The wife talks about a present her husband gave her that was really special. He gave her a tube of toothpaste and she was delighted. It was just a tube of toothpaste but what made this special is that she had mentioned that her teeth needed to be whitened and also mentioned that her teeth were becoming more sensitive to hot and cold. So her husband bought toothpaste with whitening and desensitizing ingredients in it. The wife was so pleased with the gift because it showed he had listened to her and paid attention to what she wanted.

The third part of giving a great gift is that it needs to cost you something to give it.

What made the gift the Magi brought to Jesus so special? They brought three expensive gifts, gold, frankincense and myrrh, but the gifts they brought were not the best part of their gift. It is the long journey to Bethlehem that is the most special part of the gifts they brought to Jesus. It is the long walk to Bethlehem that was the best part of their gift. They took the time and effort to travel a long way to find Jesus.

Annie took the time to think about what I liked and then went out to get and wrap the twelve presents. The doorknocker I gave my father was a great gift and part of the gift was that I took the effort to drive to the town where he built his house to get it, a three hour drive one way. It did not cost much money but it did cost in time and effort.

We received a Christmas ornament someone made for us this year and it is not only beautiful, but I know it took time and effort to make it. That makes it a wonderful gift.

Given these three qualifications of a good gift, how does God’s gift of Jesus to us at Christmas rate?

God knows us. God knows not only what we like and don’t like, he knows what we need at the deepest level of our being. He knows what we need even when sometimes we have no idea what is we most need.

We look around and think we need a house, a car, some electronics, a vacation. But God sees past those superficial desires. In the words of Paul Simon,
We work our jobs
Collect our pay
Believe we’re gliding down the highway
When in fact we’re slip slidin’ away

The end of this life is approaching when all we have worked so hard for and all we have desired so fiercely will slip away and we will be lost. Our hard work and hard-earned reputation and hard-earned money will not save us. We will be lost and it is this that Jesus sees so clearly. This is why Jesus came, to save us, to rescue us.

This is the gift of Christmas. God knows us so completely that he gave us the gift we most desperately need.

The third qualification of a good gift is the cost involved. The Magi made the long walk to Bethlehem which made their gift a great gift. Jesus made the long walk from eternity into our finite world. In the words of the early church hymn, (Philippians 2:6–8)
though [Jesus] was in the form of God, [he] did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, 7 but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. 8 And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.

God made the long walk to earth to become human and then kept on walking to the cross where he died in our place. This gift has everything that makes a great gift. We are known. Our deepest need is met with the gift and the cost of the gift is beyond our comprehension.

How do we receive a gift?

It depends on the gift.

Charles Dickens’ novel, A Tale of Two Cities, takes place during the French Revolution when the aristocracy is being guillotined. There are two men in this novel, Charles Darnay and Sydney Carton. Charles Darnay is the protagonist who ends up marrying Lucy and they all live happily ever after. Sydney Carton is a shady character who no reader roots for when reading the book. At the end of the book, Charles Darnay is in jail awaiting the guillotine when Sydney Carton arranges to take his place. (They look very much like each other.) So Sydney Carton goes to the guillotine in place of Charles Darnay so Charles can live. This is where the famous line comes from, “Tis a far better thing I do than I have ever done before.”

This is your situation. You were sitting in jail awaiting the guillotine and then Jesus took your place so you might live.

When you receive a present from someone, a beautiful bowl or a painting, it is impolite not to respond with a note expressing your appreciation for the gift. Not to respond to the gift is rude and insulting. The larger the gift, the greater the obligation. If I give you a plastic ring I found on the street, not much of a response is needed. If I give you a diamond ring, a greater response is expected. Maybe even, “Yes, I will marry you.”

If we are walking down the sidewalk and I step out into the street and you pull me back so I do not get hit by a car, a thank you is appropriate. If you push me back to safety and in the process get hit by the car and go to the hospital with a broken arm, a mere thank you seems inadequate. If you are killed by the car as you push me to safety, my life now takes on a new meaning, I have to live with the knowledge that you died to save me.

But now, if I am facing death, and you choose ahead of time that you will take my place, that you choose to die so I am free to live, I owe you my life. I must live the rest of my life for you.

In the case of Sydney Carton and Charles Darnay, the sacrifice was mitigated somewhat by the fact that Sydney was not a good person and deserved to die. Charles Darnay lived the rest of his life knowing that Sydney Carton had gone to the guillotine in his place. But think how different the story would have been if Charles Darnay had taken Sydney Carton’s place, if Charles Darnay, who did not deserve to die, had gone to the guillotine for Sydney Carton who did deserve to die?

This is what happened with you and Christ.

And as if that was not enough, God keeps on rescuing you. When you try to do right and fail, when you try to resist temptation and fail, God does not reject you. The Holy Spirit keeps on working in you, giving you second and third and fourth and fifth chances. As Christians, we are continually being rescued by God who does not give up on us, even when we give up on ourselves. God brings us hope over and over again as he encourages us to step up and try once more to live a life pleasing to him.

How do we respond to a gift that is given as perfectly as the gift of Jesus at Christmas? Paul spent eleven chapters of his letter to the church in Rome talking about the incredible work of God to rescue us and then in Romans 12:1 he writes:
I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.

In view of God’s great gift, we offer ourselves.

Notice what Paul did not say. He did not say we should offer our tithes, a portion of what we have. He did not say we should offer our time after we are finished with school or work responsibilities. He did not say we should offer the abilities we are confident we can use well.

There are no limitations to what Paul said we are to offer. We are to offer our bodies.

When a Jew brought a sheep to the Temple to be offered as a sacrifice, what happened? Did the priest clip off a bit of wool and toss it into the fire as a symbolic offering of the sheep? No. A knife was slit across the throat of the sheep and the lifeblood of the sheep was poured out. The sheep gave everything.

This makes me think of the chicken and the pig who were walking down the road when they passed a church having a fund-raising breakfast advertising “Ham and Eggs!” The chicken said, “Let’s go in and make a donation.” The pig responded, “For you it’s a donation. For me it’s a sacrifice.”

Paul did not urge us to make a donation, he urged us to make a sacrifice.

In Revelation 1 when John had his revelation of the ascended Jesus in all his glory and majesty, remember how he responded?
When I saw him, I fell at his feet as though dead.

Paul urges us to climb up on the altar and lay down our head for the slit of the knife. John did not care if he lived or died, he was at the feet of Jesus and all of him was offered to Jesus. Paul urges us to offer ourselves, all that we are, all that we desire, all that we hope to be and to be ready to give it all up for Jesus.

That is our appropriate response to the great gift of Jesus at Christmas.

What will you do with the ten dirhams you received this morning? It is a gift given without any conditions. You can see how far you can throw it. You can lose it. You can give it away. You can spend it on some candy. You can do anything you want with it.

The same is true with the gift of Jesus at Christmas. You are under no obligation to do anything with the gift of Jesus. You can ignore it. You can throw it away. You can leave church this morning without making any response to the gift of Jesus. It is not a gift you are forced to receive.

But I have to say that if you do ignore or throw away the gift of Jesus that is offered to you, the time is coming when you will deeply regret your choice. You may die this year or many years from now, but you will die and then what will you do? Jesus is a gift perfectly chosen for you, exactly what you most need and given at great cost. Be careful what you do with such a gift.

How do we share a gift?

If you were dying from cancer and someone gave you a cure for cancer, would you take it, be cured and then sit on it? Would you be grateful that you were healed and be unconcerned about others with cancer?

The shepherds had an evening concert when the angels appeared to them and shared good news (Luke 2:8–20 )
And in the same region there were shepherds out in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night. 9 And an angel of the Lord appeared to them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were filled with great fear. 10 And the angel said to them, “Fear not, for behold, I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the people. 11 For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is Christ the Lord. 12 And this will be a sign for you: you will find a baby wrapped in swaddling cloths and lying in a manger.” 13 And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God and saying,
14 “Glory to God in the highest,
and on earth peace among those with whom he is pleased!”
15 When the angels went away from them into heaven, the shepherds said to one another, “Let us go over to Bethlehem and see this thing that has happened, which the Lord has made known to us.” 16 And they went with haste and found Mary and Joseph, and the baby lying in a manger. 17 And when they saw it, they made known the saying that had been told them concerning this child. 18 And all who heard it wondered at what the shepherds told them.

How was it possible for the shepherds not to share what they had seen and heard?

Did they go door to door and hand out tracts? I don’t think so. What they had experienced was so amazing they shared with their friends and neighbors in a spontaneous expression of their delight.

We cannot sit on the knowledge that Jesus came to rescue us from certain death. We must share what we have experienced. But our world is not the same as the shepherds. We live in a world that is aware of Jesus and most people have a preconceived view of who Jesus is. Going door to door with tracts in this country would not be a good idea. So how do we share what we have received with others?

Receiving the gift of Jesus is a transforming experience. Because of the grace and mercy of God, when we surrender to Jesus, we are saved and have hope of eternal life. This is given to us without any effort on our part.

But then begins a process that is the second stage of salvation and this does involve our effort. The Holy Spirit comes to us and begins to work in cooperation with us to transform us into holy beings. Some of us are further along than others, but we begin to live increasingly transformed lives. Sometimes the change in someone when they surrender to Jesus is dramatic and sometimes it is more gradual, but when we surrender to Jesus, the Holy Spirit begins to work with us to transform us.

This becomes our witness, the way we share with others what God has done. We live transformed lives, showing kindness to people, respecting others, caring for others, helping as we are able to help.

I talked about this last night at our Christmas Eve service. In John’s gospel Jesus said (John 9:5)
As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world.

But notice that he said, “As long as I am in the world…” Jesus was the light of the world when he walked the roads of Palestine. But what about now?

In Matthew 5:14 Jesus taught his disciples,
You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden.

As we are transformed, we reflect the light of Jesus to the world, just as the moon reflects the light of the sun.

I have a friend who was deported last year along with his wife and family. They were so much loved in their neighborhood that when the news spread that they had to leave the country, the neighbors came to their apartment and wept. Their landlord wept. They had been so important to that neighborhood, praying with people and counseling with them. They were admired for being people of the Book. Their daily lives were a proclamation that Jesus loves us and came to rescue us. They brought the light of Jesus into their neighborhood.

Jesus is the perfect gift, given to us. Jesus is what you need more than anything else you think you need. Jesus made the long walk from eternity into our finite world so he could rescue us. What does it mean for the pre-existing creator God to become human and enter into the suffering of our lives? What does it mean for Jesus to take on sin and die for us. We will never, not here and not in heaven, be able to comprehend the scope of this gift. We will always be in awe of the sacrifice he made for us. We will always be amazed at the depth of his love for us.

How will you respond to the gift of Jesus to us?

Some of you have grown up in churches and heard the story over and over again but never made a declaration that you decide, from this point forward, to live for Jesus. Some of you may not be familiar with the story, but still you know in your heart that what I have said this morning it truth with a capital T.

The Holy Spirit is present with us and if you sense that truth has been spoken, then you need to decide if you will respond and make a decision to follow Jesus.

We are going to pray and then sing a couple Christmas songs. As we do, I encourage you to come forward and pray with one of us at the front of the church. Let today be the day you decide to follow Jesus.

Some of you have given your life to Jesus but then backed away. Jesus does not force us to stay with him. Our following of him is always voluntary. Some of you have been pulled aside by temptation and you have lived with guilt. After awhile the guilt was too uncomfortable and so you dulled your conscience. But this morning the Holy Spirit is reminding you of your need to repent.

I encourage you when we are singing the last two songs this morning to come forward and pray with one of us. Surrender to Jesus this morning. Rededicate your life to Jesus. Determine this morning that you will resist temptation, turn away from sin and move forward with Jesus.

Jesus is the gift that keeps on giving. Repent from your heart, turn to him and he will accept you with open arms.

One month ago, four days after arriving in Chiang Mai, Thailand to visit our daughter and her family, I began to feel achy and tired. I had a fever and began sleeping during the day. After five days of this, I went to the hospital to confirm that this was the flu and not pneumonia or an infection. Five days later I went again and this time there was an infection so they gave me some antibiotics. After another three days I began to feel better but the head cold and tiredness lasted another week or so after that.

For ten days I lay in a dark room sleeping, day and night. While Annie and our daughter’s family went out to the night safari or some other trip, I lay in bed sleeping. All I did was cough, blow my nose, drink some fluid and rest. This cycled through the day and the night. I was trapped in this dark world and I began to think what it would be like to feel like this for the rest of my life. Rationally I knew it would pass. But on an emotional level, it seemed this would never end.

I ask myself existential questions all the time. What is the purpose of my living? Why am I here? How does the experience I have make any sense? And when I am sick, laying in bed, then I go into overdrive. As I lay in the dark, feeling miserable, I asked how this made any sense in the eternal scheme of things. I felt distanced from God, distanced from my family, distanced from all relationships. What was the purpose of all this?

As I lay in bed, I thought of a young woman I knew when I worked during one of my university summers at a home for severely and profoundly retarded people. This woman was born with cerebral palsy, a disease that cripples the body. Because of this, her family left her in a crip without stimulation, only feeding her and changing her diaper. Her body was crippled but her mind was fine. She spent the first years of her life in the prison of her body as her mind slowly degraded.

She was put into the institution where I worked and people discovered she was really quite intelligent. When I was there, she had learned to spell out words by pointing a stick attached to her head at the letters of the alphabet. She composed poems.

So I thought of her. What was it like for her to grow up, laying in a bed, being ignored, her mind thinking and exploring but nowhere to go? She was in bed, not for a couple weeks, but for all the years of her life. She was a prisoner in her body. What was God’s purpose in her life.

A couple years ago I toured the orphanage on the top floor of the hospital in Meknes. When women come to give birth to a baby they do not want to keep or are not able to keep, they leave the hospital and the baby is taken upstairs. We walked through the rooms of the orphanage which was difficult in itself. But the most disturbing room was where the children with cerebral palsy are kept. We walked in and I tried to be kind and compassionate, but I was overcome with the unjustness of their lives and had to leave the room and go out in the hallway.

How is it fair that some people are born into such terrible lives? On the scale of things, my flu is such a minor scratch that it is not worth talking about. But I lay in bed, thinking of these things and sunk into despair and hopelessness.

And then, as I was gaining strength, I read Annie’s post on her blog: Snacks from the Cruise Buffet. If you are not following her postings, you are missing out on a great spiritual encouragement. Let me read her post from Friday, December 9, 2011.

Waiting in the Advent dark
Anyone who has woken up in the middle of the night and has not been able to get back to sleep understands how desolate darkness is. Time becomes suspended. The numbers on the digital clock seem stuck. There is silence, emptiness, deep shadows. The day feels very far away. There is no one else around to comfort you or share the misery of sleeplessness. You are on your own.

Of course we know that eventually the sun will rise again. We have to wait but we are certain it is only a matter of time before the day will begin. It’s like our Advent waiting. We mark off the weeks, knowing that there are only four of them. The Advent wreath with its beautiful candlelight pretties up the shadows, so we don’t feel so alone. Each time we add another candle, the light increases , a sign that we are making progress, that time is moving, that the end–or the beginning–is coming. Even better, we know where the story is going. We know that the angels are coming to sing in bright glory and the darkness will be overcome. And in the meantime, there are presents to be bought and cookies to be made and decorations to be hung. The waiting is festive.

However sometimes there can be dark places in our lives where the promise of coming light seems impossible. A place that is so dark and lonely, there seems to be no hope and we easily fall into doubt, thinking “what if I am a fool for believing the promise?”

I have a few places in my life right now where I am waiting in the dark. Living in the time of ‘not yet’ is not easy. It’s not comfortable or peaceful or infused with happiness. Anxiety buzzes. Fear spouts. Terror blooms. A terrible darkness comes to my heart as the night moves inside. It feels awful not to be in control. But even worse, there is no laboring to be done. With my hands idle, my mind races around going over one scenario and then another. Unlike a woman waiting to give birth, I have no idea how long I will have to wait. And what if I’m waiting for nothing? What if the rains don’t come and the sun doesn’t shine and the seed I’ve planted in the ground doesn’t come to life? What if I’m only waiting for a death?

I try not to dwell on it. My impulse is to fill the time, to find a way to distract myself from the awfulness of not knowing. But I can’t help it and every so often I go and check the soil where I’ve planted a seed. The ground is still dead, the earth is still dry. I begin to hear the whispering accusation: “Is God really going to take care of you?”

I hope so, I think so. But to trust God and to remain open to Him during the darkness is not something I would ever choose. I want to fix the darkness. I want to solve the problem. I want to make things happen. But in the darkness, I hear God say, “Wait. Wait. I am coming.”

So I keep waiting–I don’t really have a choice, but I start to feel dread. What if my advent doesn’t bring me the salvation of a kingly triumph that I’m looking for? What if it is more like a weak, vulnerable baby born in a stable? Or what if it is like a suffering servant who goes through an even greater darkness?

From noon until three in the afternoon darkness came over all the land. About three in the afternoon Jesus cried out in a loud voice, “Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?” (which means “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”). [Matthew 27:45-46]

In Jesus’ agonizing cry, I find a response to my dread. Because as I remain in the hopeless dark, I find a great High Priest who waits with me. He knows the shadows even better than I do. He is able to sympathize with my terror. He knows what it is like to be tempted to despair.

And He also knows what it is like to wait. Countless times He has waited for me to come to Him and receive the mercy and grace I need. He has waited through my stubbornness and self-pity and rebellion, as well as my brokenness and pain. And in this awful advent of mine, He is waiting again for me to call out to Him, so I will know I am not alone. For He is Emmanuel: God with us.

*************

We will end our Christmas Eve service tonight by lighting candles and singing Silent Night. This is a tradition, but it is not without meaning.

Who, does the Bible say, is the light of the world? Jesus, right? Jesus is the light of the world and we find this statement in John’s gospel. (John 9:5)
As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world.

But notice that he said, “As long as I am in the world…” Jesus was the light of the world when he walked the roads of Palestine. But what about now?

In Matthew 5:14 Jesus taught his disciples,
You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden.

When we light the candles at the end of the service, it is a recognition that we are the light of Christ in this world. What this means is that in the darkness of the world, we are to bring light. When we care for someone who is ill, we bring light into their darkness. When we encourage someone who is depressed, we bring light into their darkness. When we are kind to someone, patient with someone, respectful of someone, we bring light into their darkness.

And just as the light of the Advent wreath increases by one candle each week, so does the light of Christ grow as people are brought into his kingdom. When a Christian who has fallen into a pattern of sin turns around and repents, the light of Christ grows in this world. When a Christian who has been lazy and apathetic about her or his faith is renewed in faith, the light of Christ grows in this world.

Tonight you may be one of those who is desperate for some light in the darkness of your world. It may seem that the darkness is closing in and it seems there will never be any hope for you. The circumstances of your life may be overwhelming. I want to tell you that the light is increasing. Daybreak is coming. The darkness will not last forever.

It may not be dark for you tonight but it may be that there does not seem to be much light either. I want you to know that light is increasing. Because you have surrendered your life to Jesus, the Holy Spirit is at work in you. You are not without hope. The light in you is increasing. Surrender again. Open yourself to the songs of Christmas and let your heart be once again renewed.

It may be that your heart is filled with joy. Praise be to God who uses you to bring light into the darkness.

We are the light of the world. We are light, not because we have figured it out or because we have uncovered the mysteries of life. We are light because we have received the gift of Jesus that came at Christmas. The light does not come from us. We are not the sun. We are simply the moon that reflects the light of the sun and lights up the darkness of the night.

There is hope in the darkness because of Emmanuel, God with us. Light has come. The night will not last. Be filled with hope and share your hope as you bring your light into the darkness around you.

Will heaven be boring?

One of my favorite Mark Twain books is Letters from the Earth. The first part of this book is composed of letters that Lucifer, who went to earth to investigate the situation, wrote back to his fellow archangels, Michael and Gabriel. He begins by writing about the human view of heaven and he is astonished that the view of heaven man has created consists of things man does not like to do.

He writes that men do not like to sing and can take not more than two hours of listening to someone else sing. Only about two in a hundred can play a musical instrument and only four in a hundred would like to and yet in heaven everyone stands around playing a harp and singing. He says people are quickly wearied of monotony and yet they sing and play the harp for eternity.

He concludes by writing that
in man’s heaven there are no exercises for the intellect, nothing for it to live upon. It would rot there in a year – rot and stink. Rot and stink – and at that stage become holy. A blessed thing: for only the holy can stand the joys of that bedlam.

Where did this idea come from, that in heaven we will play harps and sing songs? It might have an earlier origin, but at the end of John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678) we read:
Now I saw in my dream, that these two men went in at the gate; and lo, as they entered, they were transfigured; and they had raiment put on that shone like gold. There were also that met them with harps and crowns, and gave them to them; the harps to praise withal, and the crowns in token of honor.

Pilgrim’s Progress has been translated into 200 languages and has never been out of print in the 333 years since it was first published. It has influenced our thinking about heaven and hell but what we need to remember is that it is an allegory, not a literal description of things as they are.

I look forward to our worship on Sundays at RIC. But if I had to sing all day on Sunday or all week, let alone for all of eternity, I would go nuts.

From time to time we sing a song: Over the Mountains and the Sea that has this chorus:
I could sing of your love forever,
I could sing of your love forever,
I could sing of your love forever,
I could sing of your love forever,

We sing this one time and it is ok. We sing it a second time and I am hoping the worship leader does not go back but then we sing it a third time and meanwhile I have quit singing and have to endure hearing the chorus being sung two or three more times at the end.

I find myself talking to God, “OK, I do want to sing praises but I can’t sing this chorus over and over and over again. To sing this song for eternity would be hell. I need variety.”

I want to assure you that Mark Twain was wrong, Pilgrim’s Progress is allegorical, there will be variety in heaven and it will not be boring. How do I know? Jesus was anything but boring and because Jesus reigns in heaven, his kingdom will be an exciting place to be.

Jesus turned a picnic into a miraculous feast of bread and fish. When he came to Peter’s house for supper, he healed Peter’s mother so she could make dinner. He stopped at a well for a drink of water and the town burst out in revival. He turned a funeral into a celebration when he invited the corpse to come out of the grave and be the guest of honor at a celebration feast. He showed up in the middle of the lake in a storm walking on the water as if to say, “I was in the neighborhood and thought I would drop by and say hi. And by the way, does anyone want to come walk on the water with me?” He took three of his disciples to a mountaintop meeting and met with two men who had been dead for hundreds of years and yet looked more alive than anyone the disciples had ever seen.

A place where Jesus is in charge could never be boring.

What does the Bible tell us about heaven?

First, the peaceful, blissful heaven we read about in Revelation 21 & 22 has not yet come. It is not yet a reality.  There is a supernatural battle taking place in which God and his angels are fighting against fallen angels aligned with Satan. This battle is taking place in heaven as well as on earth and is described in Revelation 12
And there was war in heaven. Michael and his angels fought against the dragon, and the dragon and his angels fought back. 8 But he was not strong enough, and they lost their place in heaven. 9 The great dragon was hurled down—that ancient serpent called the devil, or Satan, who leads the whole world astray. He was hurled to the earth, and his angels with him.

In a climactic, supernatural battle, Jesus died, Satan celebrated, and then Jesus broke the power of death by rising to life. Satan was defeated and was cast out of heaven, but he is still active and dangerous.

To use the analogy of WWII, the resurrection of Jesus was D-day when the Allied troops landed on the coast of France. With that successful invasion, the course of the war was determined. There was still a lot of fighting that took place before the troops arrived in Berlin and the final surrender of Germany, but the critical battle was at D-day. In the same way, the final defeat of Satan was set when Jesus rose from the dead, but there is still a lot of fighting to go before the end.

John continued in Revelation 12:
12 Therefore rejoice, you heavens
and you who dwell in them!
But woe to the earth and the sea,
because the devil has gone down to you!
He is filled with fury,
because he knows that his time is short.”

The devil is filled with fury because he knows that his time is short and we suffer from his rage.

There is yet to come the final judgment and it is at this time that the angels, as well as us, will be judged. Until then, the battle rages on. Until then there is not peace in earth or in heaven. Heaven, as well as earth, longs for the final redemption when Satan will be cast into oblivion and Jesus will ascend the throne and then the heaven described in Revelation 21 & 22 will be a reality. (Revelation 21:3–4)
And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God. 4 He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.”

Second, when we die we “fall asleep”, as the New Testament puts it, and enter into a bodiless state. Paul wrote in I Thessalonians 4
Brothers, we do not want you to be ignorant about those who fall asleep, or to grieve like the rest of men, who have no hope. 14 We believe that Jesus died and rose again and so we believe that God will bring with Jesus those who have fallen asleep in him. 15 According to the Lord’s own word, we tell you that we who are still alive, who are left till the coming of the Lord, will certainly not precede those who have fallen asleep. 16 For the Lord himself will come down from heaven, with a loud command, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet call of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first. 17 After that, we who are still alive and are left will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And so we will be with the Lord forever.

“The dead in Christ will rise first.” This seems to indicate that when we die we enter into a state without a body and wait. Some in the church, including those we read about in the New Testament, have been dead in Christ for two thousand years. It is not until the end, when Jesus returns to judge the nations, that we will all be raised to be with him, And only then we will receive our heavenly bodies and enter into the eternal rest of heaven.

This raises some questions. This is not how we think about heaven or what we say to people when we are trying to comfort them at a funeral. Where is it we wait?

In The Great Divorce, C. S. Lewis presented a picture of heaven and hell and in this book he wrote that the place where we wait, if we are eventually judged to have been faithful to Jesus, will always have seemed to be heaven. And if we are eventually judged to have been rebellious, the place we wait will always have seemed to be hell.

There are some hints in Scripture about heaven, but it is always difficult to know what is metaphorical and what is not. These hints do seem to say that after we die we will be with God. Revelation 6 talks about the martyrs waiting in heaven for the rest of those to be slain to come into heaven. After Hebrews 11, the great chapter of the heros of faith, chapter 12 begins:
Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses

This may be metaphorical or a real description that those who have died are watching the events on earth. Perhaps they have some part to play in how things work out. Maybe our work for God is not done after we die.

When Peter wrote his second letter towards the end of his life he said, (II Peter 1)
I think it is right to refresh your memory as long as I live in the tent of this body, 14 because I know that I will soon put it aside, as our Lord Jesus Christ has made clear to me. 15 And I will make every effort to see that after my departure you will always be able to remember these things.

He may have been talking about putting his stories about Jesus in a book or he may have been talking about using whatever influence was available to him after he died.

The truth is we do not know very much at all about what it will be like and what role we will play in this period of waiting. Paul certainly did not think it would be a long time of waiting. Perhaps if Paul had known that 2,000 years later we would still be waiting for Jesus to return, he would have spent more time thinking and writing about what this waiting state would be like.

Let me say as well that our primary problem in understanding the sequence of events in heaven is that we are limited to our four dimensions and God exists in the presence of additional dimensions. So for God, in a way we cannot understand, everything is present.

C.S. Lewis suggested at the end of his Chronicles of Narnia that all those who die arrive in heaven together and it seems there was no delay between their death and coming into his kingdom.

We insist on a past, present and future but God is not limited by our dimensions which will always make it difficult for us to have a true picture of what will happen in our future.

I like to think we have a purpose after we die and while we wait for the final judgment. I like to think that Peter and Paul, Mary and Joseph, and all the rest of the saints who have preceded us in death have been working with Jesus throughout the centuries of earth time. Perhaps they have been able to encourage those who did not choose Jesus during their life to reconsider now that they have a better perspective. Who knows?

One way or another, God is taking care of his children in these years between his ascension to heaven and his return.

Third, at the end of time this earth and heaven will be destroyed. They were created together; they will be destroyed together and then they will be recreated together.

Isaiah wrote (Isaiah 51:6)
Lift up your eyes to the heavens,
look at the earth beneath;
the heavens will vanish like smoke,
the earth will wear out like a garment
and its inhabitants die like flies.
But my salvation will last forever,
my righteousness will never fail.

And in John’s Revelation (21:1)
Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and there was no longer any sea.

Earth and heaven will be destroyed and then recreated.

In summary, the heaven of the New Testament was and is a place of conflict. God exercises wrath against the demonic attack that threatens to remove him from his sovereign throne. Satan has been defeated but he is being permitted to cause trouble until it is time for Jesus to call an end to time.

Therefore, as Christians, we do not look to this world or to the current heaven for our ultimate rest since this heaven and this earth still suffer from the presence of evil.

Christians on earth and those in heaven are looking forward to the day when Christ will appear as Lord and by his divine power he will end the demonic threat. Satan and his angels will be judged and cast into oblivion. Jesus shall ascend the throne and we will receive our transformed bodies and eternally reign with the Father, Son and Holy Spirit in the new heaven and new earth.

This is what the Bible teaches about heaven.

Let me engage in some speculation of what I think heaven, after the final judgment, might be like.

In speculating, let me take you through a reasoning process. 1. We are created in God’s image. 2. Who we are is deformed by sin. 3. In heaven we will be without sin, as God created us to be. 4. If we want to know what heaven will be like, look at who we are now and remove what is sinful. What is left is who we will be in heaven.

This reasoning leads me to the conclusion that in heaven we will be curious. We will want to know more. We will have a thirst for knowledge. We will have a desire to learn more about God’s creation. There will be a new earth and a new heaven to explore. Imagine a new earth without all the sinful affects of our exploitation and neglect of the environment.

When I was a new Christian I used to think that when I died I would know everything. But I have come to understand that even in heaven I will be a created being in the presence of my creator who preexisted creation. Because of this there will always be a lot we do not know and a lot for us to discover.

God created us with a body, a spirit and a mind and all three of these will be present and active in the new heaven and the new earth.

There is a description of the wisdom of King Solomon in 1 Kings 4:29–34
And God gave Solomon wisdom and understanding beyond measure, and breadth of mind like the sand on the seashore, 30 so that Solomon’s wisdom surpassed the wisdom of all the people of the east and all the wisdom of Egypt.
33 He spoke of trees, from the cedar that is in Lebanon to the hyssop that grows out of the wall. He spoke also of beasts, and of birds, and of reptiles, and of fish.

God gave Adam the task of naming the creatures in the Garden of Eden. Solomon was praised for his wisdom which consisted, in part, of his interest in and knowledge of plants and animals.

I have been impressed in reading biographies that many of the leading theologians of the church have been lovers and explorers of nature. Jonathan Edwards spent hours walking in the woods. He kept notebooks in which he wrote down the questions that arose from what he observed. “Of all insects, no one is more wonderful than the spider, especially with respect to their sagacity and admirable way of working.” He learned by observation how spiders seemed to be able to fly great distances from tree to tree. “The appearance is truly very pretty and pleasing, and it was so pleasing, as well as surprising, to me, that I resolved to endeavor to satisfy my curiosity about it.” He learned that the filament spiders released from their tails was lighter than air, so that by simply letting enough of it out they could ascend or simply float in the air. He started a study of optics to answer the question why a spider’s filament is so small it can barely be seen when it is close to us, but can be seen from a much greater distance when it is between us and the sun.

As a graduate student in his early twenties, he kept a notebook titled, “Things to Be Considered and Written Fully About,” in which he listed questions such as: Why is air necessary to preserve a fire? Why are all mountains pitched westward? Why are no two trees exactly alike? What makes a bubble break? Why is the heat of the sun’s rays greater nearer the surface of the earth than higher up? Why do waves form as they do? Why does lightening not travel in a straight line and why do repeated flashes follow the same pattern?

This curiosity and thirst for knowledge is God given and part of what I think will be in heaven.

I imagine that angels might give lectures on physics, chemistry, biology, mathematics, psychology, literature and history. Maybe in heaven I will finally learn how to paint – and understand the geometrical proofs I memorized.

I think there will be humor in heaven. Humor is not sinful. It can be, but it does not need to be. I imagine there will be joke nights in which we will judge who made the silliest prayers and everyone will laugh, including the one who prayed the prayer. I remember one night when Ken Morrow and Tracy Troxel traded jokes back and forth in our salon and we were all doubled over in laughter. Can you imagine the laughter in heaven with jokes flying from all directions?

I believe we will enjoy rich diversity in heaven, not only races and nations but the riches of cultures that died out a long time ago. The musical celebrations will be incredible as we blend the musical styles of the world and time.

We will be unique in heaven, no two of us alike. God enjoys variety. Look at insects and flowers and birds. Look at us. We are made differently and because of that we have different preferences and tastes. We have different points of view.

This makes me think we will have debates in heaven. None of us will have mastered the truth of God. The pre-existing God will have a lot of depth to explore. So we will discuss and debate as we are led into truth. Intellectual snobbery and pretense will not be present. The goal will not be to win the debate. Everyone will be eager to learn and be led into truth. This will make the discussions exhilarating.

I believe we will meet those who lived before and after us. We will hear their stories and as we listen, we will discover how intricately and dynamically God worked in us and used us in the lives of others. We will meet those who influenced us and we will meet those we influenced. The focus will not be on us but we will grow in our astonished wonderment at the orchestration of God in our lives.

If Mark Twain had been told what the Bible says about living in a resurrected body and being with people we love on a resurrected Earth with gardens and rivers and mountains and untold adventures, he might have been a bit more interested.

Whatever heaven will be like, I know it will be wonderful. At the end of his seven-book series, The Chronicles of Narnia, C. S. Lewis writes:
And for us this is the end of all the stories, and we can most truly say that they all lived happily ever after. But for them it was only the beginning of the real story. All their life in this world and all their adventures… had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story which no one on earth has read: which goes on forever: in which every chapter is better than the one before.

Heaven will be more exciting, more intellectually stimulating, more pleasurable, more satisfying, more adventurous than you can possibly imagine.

What will we look like in heaven?

Paul wrote about our bodies being tents.
2 Corinthians 5:1–2
For we know that if the tent that is our earthly home is destroyed, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. 2 For in this tent we groan, longing to put on our heavenly dwelling,

The body we have now is not the body we will have in heaven. (This comes as good news to some of us.) Whether our body turns to dust in the grave or is cremated, in either case it will be left behind. But we will have a new body in heaven, made the way God created us to be. We believe in the resurrection of the body. We will not be disembodied spirits.

In this world a beautiful body can hold an ugly soul. But I believe there will be no mismatch in heaven. I like to think that our bodies will reflect our souls. As we grow in faith our souls become more and more beautiful and that beauty will be reflected in our heavenly body. And if we have ugly souls, we will have ugly bodies, like the gargoyles that hang on the edge of cathedrals in Europe.

How does what I believe about heaven affect me now?

First, the reality of heaven should make me put more emphasis on the development of the beauty of my soul than the beauty of my body. We spend an enormous amount of money and time trying to make ourselves beautiful. We do this on a body that will deteriorate despite our best efforts and will be eventually left behind.

An eternal perspective helps us follow Peter’s advice: (1 Peter 3:3–5)
Do not let your adorning be external—the braiding of hair and the putting on of gold jewelry, or the clothing you wear— 4 but let your adorning be the hidden person of the heart with the imperishable beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit, which in God’s sight is very precious.

We need to put far more attention on our coming heavenly dwelling than we do on our temporary tent.

Secondly, my view of eternal life makes a difference in what I live for.

One of our memorable family vacations was to the northwest of the US. We camped in the Olympia peninsula and then crossed over to Canada and camped on Victoria Island. It was beautiful, beautiful, beautiful.

On our way back to Seattle, we took a ferry and passed between a number of small islands with beautiful homes. I stood there thinking how beautiful they were, how much I would enjoy living there. I quickly dissolved into lust for these beautiful homes on beautiful islands in a part of the world that is so beautiful. And then I began to sing this chorus.
Heaven is a wonderful place
Filled with God’s glory and grace
I’m gonna see my Savior’s face
‘cause heaven is a wonderful place

This is, in fact, one of my coping strategies when I see something I really like that I cannot afford to buy. I sing this chorus to remind myself that this life will pass away and no matter what I see that attracts me so powerfully, one day, as beautiful as it seems now, it will seem cheap and tawdry compared to the wonders and delights of heaven.

Even the memory of a seven-course meal in an expensive French restaurant will seem bland when we sit at the wedding banquet and feast on the foods prepared for us.

Knowing that heaven awaits me allows me to focus on what matters here on earth and to be willing to pass by even the most tempting treats of this world.

Thirdly, my view of eternal life makes a difference in how I treat people.

The world tells us to pay attention to powerful and beautiful people but in heaven these earthly distinctions will not exist. The employer will stand next to the employee. The professor will stand next to the janitor. The president will stand next to the plumber.

When I realize this, every person I meet becomes important. My believe in an everlasting life helps me to respect each person I meet. It is important not to take anyone for granted. The man who is the car guardian is as important as the waiter in the restaurant, who is as important as the owner of the restaurant, who is as important as the people I am eating with.

When I pass by a beggar, I need to know I may one day be in heaven with that person. This does not mean I need to give money to each beggar or to any beggars, but I need to treat them with respect.

There is a man who was harassing young women in our church and after several years of talking to him I finally told him he was no longer permitted to come to church or to any of our church events. I told him this recognizing I may one day be standing next to him in heaven.

We do make distinctions between people in this world and sometimes we have to take actions others do not like, but whatever we do, we need to keep in mind God’s grace and the possibility that we will be in heaven together.

Finally, when we become aware of heaven we realize that there will be a judgment and we will spend eternity in heaven or we will spend eternity in hell.

Mark Twain had a dim view of man’s view of heaven, but he had a false view of heaven. Twain joked that you should go to Heaven for the climate and Hell for the company.

This is a great joke that pokes fun at the hypocritical church that views itself as morally superior to the sinners of the world. But when we truly understand the realities of heaven and hell, there is nothing to joke about.

It is far more than a matter of life and death. It is a matter of eternal life and eternal death. And as Woody Allen said, “Eternity is a very long time, especially towards the end.”

It is so important that we understand that we face a choice that has eternal consequences.

A longing for heaven and a fear of hell is not a bad place for us to be.

Randy Alcorn has written a book about heaven and in it he wrote:
You are made for a person and a place.
Jesus is the person, and Heaven is the place.
They are a package—they come together.
You cannot get Heaven without Jesus or Jesus without Heaven.

God did not create you to live on earth and go to school and go to work and get married and have children, grandchildren, maybe great-grandchildren and then die. God created you to live with him for eternity.

You were created to be with Jesus for eternity.

You were not created for earth, you were created for heaven.

You were created to be with Jesus in heaven for eternity.

Heaven is a wonderful place
Filled with God’s glory and grace
I’m gonna see my Savior’s face
‘cause heaven is a wonderful place

I pray I will be there and I pray you will be there with me.

****************************************************
Isaiah 25:6–8 (ESV)
6 On this mountain the Lord of hosts will make for all peoples
a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wine,
of rich food full of marrow, of aged wine well refined.
7 And he will swallow up on this mountain
the covering that is cast over all peoples,
the veil that is spread over all nations.
8 He will swallow up death forever;
and the Lord God will wipe away tears from all faces,
and the reproach of his people he will take away from all the earth,
for the Lord has spoken.

We come this morning in our series of sermons on the Apostles’ Creed to “I believe in the forgiveness of sins.”

What would it be like if there was not forgiveness for sins?

My mother had a difficult time forgiving. Her best friend, my father’s oldest sister, betrayed her in the split of a family business and she cut her and all of her family out of her life and out of our lives – literally. She went through all the photo albums with scissors and cut out the faces of all the relatives who had offended her. When I wrote my dad’s oral history the year before I came to Morocco, I had to go to one of my aunts to get her copies of these photographs. My mother’s unforgiveness was icy cold. When I or one of my siblings did something she was unhappy with, she cut us off as if we did not exist. Because she was upset with me for a perceived offense, she did not speak to me for the year and a half before I came to Morocco. When my father came to my house to work on his oral history, my mother was furious at him for coming to see me.  (A couple weeks before I left for Morocco my mother let me out of the doghouse and in the days before I left was as kind and loving toward me as she had been cold and distant before. She was a difficult woman.)

Some of us know what not being forgiven is like because we have had people in our lives who were never able to forgive us for something we did that was wrong – or for something they perceived we had done wrong.

Some of us have had experience with unforgiveness and it is not pleasant. But what if God did not forgive us for our sins? If not, then none of what we have covered thus far in the Apostles’ Creed would be of any worth to us. Think about it:
I believe in God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth,
And in Jesus Christ, His only son, our Lord,
Who was conceived by the Holy Spirit,
Born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate,
Was crucified, dead and buried; he descended into hell;
The third day He rose again from the dead;
He ascended into heaven, and sits on the right hand of God the Father Almighty,
From there He shall come to judge the living and the dead.
I believe in the Holy Spirit, the Holy Universal Church,
The communion of saints,

An all-powerful God who does not forgive us our sins? This makes us his enemies, destined for destruction. Of what benefit is the life of Jesus, his death and resurrection if there is no forgiveness of sins? It might be an inspirational story, but it would mean nothing to us. The fact that Jesus will come to judge the living and the dead would be a horrifying prospect. Forgiveness of sins is such a basic truth that it seems implied in all that has been said thus far in the Apostles’ Creed, but when it was written, it was deemed necessary to proclaim this truth.

I believe in the forgiveness of sins. This has two parts to it: being forgiven and forgiving others. I will break this up into two sermons this morning.

One of the best places to go in Scripture to examine what it means to be forgiven for our sins is the parable Jesus told about a son who wanted his inheritance before his father died.

The culture of Jesus in Palestine was an honor/shame culture and it helps to read the parable in this light to bring out the depth of meaning in the parable.

The son decided he had enough of working in the fields and wanted to go out to see the world. So he came to his father and asked for his share of the inheritance. To ask this of his father was to say that he wished his father was dead. It was as if he said, “I’m tired of waiting for you to die, give me what is coming to me.”

In a modern setting this would not be quite as dishonoring because our wealth is in banks and investments. We can take a third of what we have and pass it on and no one knows what we have done except the bank. But in an agricultural culture, giving a third of the inheritance meant selling fields and flocks. This meant that the dishonoring of the father became public knowledge. The whole town knew what was happening. “Did you hear that James sold some of his fields and flocks?” “I heard it was because his good for nothing son demanded his share of the inheritance.” “What an ungrateful son! If it were me, I would have just kicked him out of the house.” The entire town knew what had happened and talked about the shame inflicted on the father by the son.

Since he was the second of two sons, his share was 1/3 and he took the money and went off into a distant land and lived a wild life with prostitutes and parties. When his money was spent, his friends deserted him and he was forced to make a living taking care of pigs. In a culture that considered pigs unclean, this was the lowest you could sink. But just to make it even worse, Jesus added the detail that he was so hungry he had to eat the food that was given to the pigs.

Then he came to his senses and decided he would come home. He knew he had dishonored his father and brought shame to his family. So he decided to come back and accept the shame that was due to him. He would come back as a servant and work in the household where he had once been one of the sons. He would pay his father back by working hard and he would ease the shame of his father by being a servant.

But when he was still a long way off, his father saw him, came running to him, and restored honor to him by putting on a robe, a ring and celebrating with a party.

In this first of two sermons this morning, I want to pull out some lessons from this parable that will help us to receive forgiveness from God for our sins.

The first lesson is that God comes to us.

Now I know that the son came to his senses and decided to come back to his father. That is true. When we are caught up in our sin, we need to come to our senses and realize this is not a good life for us. We need to turn around and head back home.

But the father was looking for his son and when he was still a long way off, he came running to meet him. So they both came together but the more amazing of the two actions is the running of the father.

In the culture of Palestine, the lesser came to the greater. The servant came to the master; the master did not come to the servant. The son came to the father, not the father to the son. And the father did not simply come, he ran, which meant he lifted his robes, baring his legs in public as if he were a slave or servant. The father publically shamed himself by running to greet his son.

In the stories of Jesus in the Gospels, there is a pattern which is seen in this parable. Jesus looks, he has compassion and then he acts. Read the accounts of Jesus in the gospels and you will see this pattern over and over again. The father looked, which meant he spent much of his day looking. Day after day he stood looking down the road, waiting for his son to come home and then when he saw him, he had compassion and acted, lifting his robes to run and greet his son.

This is how God acts toward us. We live in disobedience. We are indifferent to God or we may be hostile toward God. We live as though we are the center of the universe, doing what pleases us. And then when we come to our senses, God has compassion and humbles himself by running to greet us.

The pre-existing creator God of the universe, the all-powerful God, comes running to us to greet us. This is amazing grace. We receive in abundance what we do not deserve.

Secondly, God restores honor to us by absorbing our shame.

The son hoped to be accepted as a servant. But there was a good chance his father would reject him. That is what he deserved. But maybe, just maybe, his father would permit him to stay as a servant. This was as high as he dared to dream. But to his astonishment he was received as a son. The father put on him a robe and ring and called to his servants to kill the fatted calf for a feast of celebration.

The son had disgraced himself by shaming his father and family in the eyes of the household and in the eyes of the community. And now the father restored honor to him, elevating him to his former status as a son.

Tim Keller points out that:
…God’s grace and forgiveness, while free to the recipient, are always costly for the giver…. From the earliest parts of the Bible, it was understood that God could not forgive without sacrifice. No one who is seriously wronged can “just forgive” the perpetrator…. But when you forgive, that means you absorb the loss and the debt. You bear it yourself. All forgiveness, then, is costly.

In restoring honor to the son, the father had to absorb the pain of the dishonoring that had taken place. Because of the actions of the son, the father was dishonored, the family and servants of the household were dishonored, the community was dishonored. In a small community the shame spreads out.

When the son came back, he faced not just the rejection of his father, but also the rejection of his brother, the servants and the entire community. In the second part of this parable the older son complains at what his father had done. The older son and others in the community were still looking for revenge for the actions of the younger son but the father took upon himself all the pain that the younger son deserved.

This is what Jesus did for us. We came, having disgraced God by our actions, and he absorbed the shame by shaming himself on the cross, exposing his body to public view, being beaten and flogged, dying for us.

And then, even more cruelly, after we have received such wonderful honor, being privileged to call ourselves daughters and sons of God, we drag the Holy Spirit with us into our continuing sin. We dishonor God and bring shame to him by our actions.

What is God’s response? Amazingly, he continues to look out, waiting to see that we are on the way back home and then he runs and restores honor to us. He continually absorbs the shame of our actions.

Amazing grace.

Thirdly, the most difficult part of forgiveness is not receiving forgiveness but deciding to turn around and head back home.

Because of God’s compassion and love, we will be forgiven. But we are shamed by our actions and we do not like to even think about it ourselves. We can come to church week after week, month after month, sometimes year after year and keep hidden the shame we feel. We can very effectively bury the shame so we rarely think about it ourselves. And when we do think about it, we rationalize it and rebury it.

We need to open ourselves to the shame we feel, turn around and head back home where we will receive a warm welcome and our honor will be restored.

In the Marriage Course some of us are taking, there are some couples on the DVD who talked about recovering from adulterous affairs. And it is amazing to me to see these couples sitting together, talking about the pain of what they had experienced and then about how they had been able to forgive and have the intimacy in their relationship restored.

No matter what you have done, there is hope for you because there is forgiveness of sins.

We’re going to take some time now to reflect, in silence, and open ourselves to the ways in which we have disobeyed God and then turn around, come back home and ask for forgiveness.

How do you know where there is sin in your life? Open yourself to the Holy Spirit and let him bring things to your mind. Where you feel shame, that is where you will find sin.

Psalm 139:23–24 (ESV)
Search me, O God, and know my heart!
Try me and know my thoughts!
24 And see if there be any grievous way in me,
and lead me in the way everlasting!

Part 2

Jesus was a great story teller and although his stories were told two thousand years ago, they seem to pulsate with life in our present age. The second parable this morning was told in response to a question Peter asked,
“Lord, how often will my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? As many as seven times?”

The rabbis taught that a person ought to be forgiven three times for a particular offense and then after that, there was no obligation to forgive again. Peter knew Jesus liked to take the law and understand it at a heart level, so he doubled the number and added one for good luck.

But then Jesus took Peter’s seven and knocked it to the moon.
Jesus said to him, “I do not say to you seven times, but seventy-seven times.

Seven was the number of completion and perfection so Jesus effectively said there is no limit to the number of times we are supposed to forgive. And then he told this story.

A king wanted to settle accounts with his servants and so a man came to him who owed ten thousand talents. If we assume the modern equivalent of the daily wage for a laborer to be $50 US a day, then the 10,000 talents becomes $3,000,000,000 US. So the people listening to Jesus must have gasped when Jesus told how much money was owed. This was a debt that was impossible to pay.

The king ordered the servant and his family to be thrown into jail and everything they had to be sold to repay at least part of the debt. But when the man pleaded and begged for mercy, the king had pity on him, cancelled the debt and let him go.

This was an act of incredible generosity. The people hearing Jesus’s story were amazed at the good fortune this man had received.

But then this man went out and found a fellow servant who owed him a hundred denarii, a hundred days of wages, sixteen and 2/3 weeks of work, $5,000 US. This was not an insignificant amount, but compared to the ten thousand talents, this was nothing.

The servant who had been forgiven grabbed him and began to choke him, saying, “Pay what you owe.” The fellow servant begged for mercy and promised to pay him back, but he refused and had the man thrown into prison until he could pay the debt.

This is the height of arrogance. He had been forgiven a debt of three billion dollars and refused to be patient with the small debt of five thousand dollars that was owed to him.

When the king heard about this, he had the unmerciful servant turned over to the jailers to be tortured until he could pay his debt.

And then Jesus said,
So also my heavenly Father will do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother from your heart.

If that is not sobering, you are not really listening or comprehending. If you do not forgive your brothers and sisters who offend you, you will not be forgiven by God.

The first part of this sermon on forgiveness is the easy part. No matter how difficult it is for you to face your shame and turn back to head home, it is far easier than forgiving someone who has hurt you.

This is the first lesson in this sermon part 2 on forgiving others: Forgiving someone who has hurt you is going to be painful.

I’m not talking about some slight offense when you can say, “I forgive you,” without it costing you anything. I’m talking about someone who betrayed your trust, someone who you thought was your friend but then deserted you, someone who caused you pain by acting against you.

If someone has hurt me, justice demands that they pay the price of their actions. An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. That is what justice demands. For me to simply say, “I forgive you,” when someone has deeply hurt me is not fair and it is not just. Who is going to pay for the injustice? Am I supposed to simply forgive and let the person who has hurt me go free? Shouldn’t I at least make them suffer before I tell them I forgive them?

The parable of the unmerciful servant tells us that we have to become the father in the parable of the prodigal son. As the father forgave his son, so do we have to forgive those who shame us and hurt us. As the father absorbed the shame created by the son, so are we to absorb the pain of the injustice that was done to us.

Tim Keller points out that:
Mercy and forgiveness must be free and unmerited to the wrongdoer. If the wrongdoer has to do something to merit it, then it isn’t mercy, but forgiveness always comes at a cost to the one granting the forgiveness.

When someone does something wrong, when they hurt you or someone you love, a pain is created and it cannot simply be ignored. Someone has to absorb the pain and Keller says that forgiving is absorbing pain, not inflicting it. Our every instinct is to strike back, make the other person suffer. But this is not what God has done for us and this is not what we are to do to others.

Don’t wait for the person who has offended you to repent and grovel in front of you. Forgive before the person ever comes to you or shows any sign of repentance.

I have used the analogy of two adjoining hotel rooms with a door connecting the two rooms. Each room has a door so to go in and out of the two rooms, both doors have to be open. Forgiving someone is keeping your door open so whenever they decide to return and come back into relationship with you, you are ready to receive them.

The second lesson is that there is nothing anyone can ever do to you or to someone you love that is worse than what you have done to God, so you need to forgive as God has forgiven you.

I don’t have time to repreach this sermon, but you were once God’s enemy deserving of his eternal wrath. And to you, when you were lost with no hope of life after death, Jesus came to die for you while you were still putting yourself at the center of the universe, living for yourself. That is a three billion dollar debt you will never be able to repay.

Since you have been forgiven such a great debt, you must forgive others. Remember the prayer Jesus taught his disciples to pray? (Luke 11:4)
and forgive us our sins, for we ourselves forgive everyone who is indebted to us.

When you forgive, forget. Release the wrong. Let it go. If this offends you, listen to how God forgives us. (Psalm 103:8–12)
The Lord is merciful and gracious,
slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.
9 He will not always chide,
nor will he keep his anger forever.
10 He does not deal with us according to our sins,
nor repay us according to our iniquities.
11 For as high as the heavens are above the earth,
so great is his steadfast love toward those who fear him;
12 as far as the east is from the west,
so far does he remove our transgressions from us.

This means forgiveness has to come from the heart. It cannot be superficial. Forgiveness does not keep the memory stored in a back pocket so it can be used in a future argument.

Henry Ward Beecher said:
“I can forgive, but I cannot forget” is only another way of saying,
“I will not forgive.” Forgiveness ought to be like a canceled note–
torn in two and burned up so that it never can be shown against one.

You may say this is too much. This is not right. This is not fair. I cannot forgive the person who has hurt me in this way.

Don’t give up. Keep listening as we come to lesson three.

The only person who suffers when you do not forgive someone is you.

Anne Lamott wrote:
Not forgiving is like drinking rat poison and then waiting for the rat to die.

When you do not forgive, there is a poison that infects your heart. This is what happened to my mother. Because she was so deeply hurt by her best friend’s betrayal, she harbored unforgiveness and it turned her into a bitter, angry woman. Not forgiving destroyed her; it had very little affect on my aunt, her sister-in-law.

Not forgiving someone is a self-destructive action. You need to forgive for your own sake, for your own healing.

Not forgiving someone, holding on to the anger and bitterness is destructive in this life and it also has eternal consequences. Remember the warning Jesus gave at the end of his parable.
So also my heavenly Father will do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother from your heart.”

George Herbert, a Welsh born, English poet from the early 17th century wrote:
He that cannot forgive others breaks the bridge over which he himself must pass if he would ever reach heaven; for every one has need to be forgiven.

Forgive so you can be healed and forgive so you will be forgiven.

But if you say, Pastor Jack, even with this, I just cannot forgive, then listen to lesson four.

You will not be able to forgive deep hurts on your own.

As I have prepared this sermon, I have been thinking about a person who has deeply hurt me. I don’t want to talk about the details because I do not want this person to know how deeply he/she has hurt me. I don’t even want to identify the sex of the person to give a clue about who it is.

How do I forgive this person?

I’m running out of time so let me briefly tell the story of Corrie Ten Boom who was a Dutch woman. She and her family were arrested by German Nazis when they were caught hiding Jews. She and her sister and father were sent to concentration camps where both her father and sister died. Miraculously she was released and after the war spoke about forgiveness and reconciliation throughout Holland and Germany and elsewhere. This is her well-known story about forgiving those who have hurt us.

It was at a church service in Munich that I saw him, a former S.S. man who had stood guard at the shower room door in the processing center at Ravensbruck. He was the first of our actual jailers that I had seen since that time. And suddenly it was all there – the roomful of mocking men, the heaps of clothing, Betsie’s pain-blanched face.

He came up to me as the church was emptying, beaming and bowing. “How grateful I am for your message, Fraulein.” He said. “To think that, as you say, He has washed my sins away!” His hand was thrust out to shake mine. And I, who had preached so often to the people in Bloemendaal the need to forgive, kept my hand at my side.

Even as the angry, vengeful thoughts boiled through me, I saw the sin of them. Jesus Christ had died for this man; was I going to ask for more? Lord Jesus, I prayed, forgive me and help me to forgive him. I tried to smile, I struggled to raise my hand. I could not. I felt nothing, not the slightest spark of warmth or charity. And so again I breathed a silent prayer. Jesus, I prayed, I cannot forgive him. Give me Your forgiveness.

As I took his hand the most incredible thing happened. From my shoulder along my arm and through my hand a current seemed to pass from me to him, while into my heart sprang a love for this stranger that almost overwhelmed me. And so I discovered that it is not on our forgiveness any more than on our goodness that the world’s healing hinges, but on His. When He tells us to love our enemies, He gives, along with the command, the love itself.

Jesus does not ask us to do something he will not help us to do. When we trust him, he will help us to forgive from the heart.

But I have one more question: What do you do when someone continues to hurt you, continues to cause you pain? It is one thing to forgive for something in the past, but what about ongoing pain?

Isn’t this the question Peter asked, “Do we forgive up to seven times?” And what was Jesus’ answer? Yes, seventy-seven times. Forgive without end.

Forgiveness is costly. We have to absorb the pain and forgive. Each day we pick up our cross and follow Jesus. Each day we need to forgive the person who has hurt us. Each day we have to ask God to help us do what we cannot do ourselves. There may be some offences against us that will require us each day to forgive that person.

We are going to take some time now to reflect and see who it is the Holy Spirit brings to our mind that we need to forgive. When we need to be forgiven, shame is the indicator that there is sin that needs to be confessed. When we need to forgive, there is another indicator.

Against whom do you hold a grudge? When you hear a good report about someone and that offends you, then that is a good indication that you are holding a grudge against that person and need to forgive them. If you think it is good news when something bad happens to someone, it is an indication that you are holding a grudge and need to forgive.

It may be you hold a grudge against a group or a country and you may need to pray to forgive a nation. Holding a grudge indicates there is a need for you to forgive.

Let’s take some time now to reflect in silence and ask the Holy Spirit to reveal to us those we need to forgive.

Psalm 139:23–24 (ESV)
Search me, O God, and know my heart!
Try me and know my thoughts!
24 And see if there be any grievous way in me,
and lead me in the way everlasting!

*****************************************************
Therefore, as God’s chosen people, holy and dearly loved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience. Bear with each other and forgive one another if any of you has a grievance against someone. Forgive as the Lord forgave you. And over all these virtues put on love, which binds them all together in perfect unity. Colossians 3:12-14

Does the Holy Spirit get upset when people ignore him? For many years, the Evangelical church in the US was accused of being Bitarian rather than Trinitarian because it talked about the Father and the Son but almost never about the Holy Spirit. Did the Holy Spirit feel like a third wheel in the trinity? Did the Holy Spirit ever want to say to the church, “What am I, chopped liver?” Should we try to make it up to the Holy Spirit by praying to him as well as praying to the Father and the Son? We sing a lot of songs about Jesus. Should we sing more songs about the Holy Spirit? Should we sing a third of our songs to the Father, a third to the Son and a third to the Holy Spirit so no one feels left out?

The problem with all these questions is that they assume there are three gods who compete for attention, but that is not the case. There is one God who is triune: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit does not need equal time. To pray to the Father is to pray to the Son and Spirit. To praise the Son is to praise the Father and Spirit. To submit to the Holy Spirit is to submit to the Father and Son. There is one God, not three gods.

There is one God but it is as if God presents himself in three different ways. God the Father is the creator of the universe, the first person in the Trinity. Jesus said only the Father knows the time of his return. God the Son is the human manifestation of God, our savior. Jesus is the one seated on the throne before whom every knee will bow and every tongue confess that he is King of kings and Lord of lords. God the Holy Spirit is the power of God in this world. It is through the Holy Spirit that God’s will is accomplished.

There is one God but three different roles. And even here they are not so distinct. God created the universe but the Holy Spirit hovered over the waters at the beginning in Genesis and Paul  in Colossians and the writer of Hebrews wrote that through Jesus everything was created. There are different roles but one God so we cannot always make clear, separate job descriptions to define each person of the Trinity.

You can see the problem in talking about the Trinity. As soon as I talk about the Holy Spirit I am talking about a person and in our minds that person is separate and distinct. But as I have mentioned in other sermons, the difficulty is that we are too limited to comprehend the complete view of God and so we are easily and understandably confused. We can only understand what is confined to our universe in time and space. God who exists outside of our time and space is going to be far more than we can grasp.

When the church has focused on God the Father and God the Son but ignored God the Holy Spirit, the triune God has not suffered – the church has suffered because we have limited ourselves to only a part of the work of God in the world. The Holy Spirit does not have self-esteem issues that we need to correct; we have an inadequate view of God that deprives us of all that God has to offer.

When you talk about God: Father, Son and Holy Spirit, be deliberate about resting in the mystery of what we cannot comprehend. Don’t be nervous about making seemingly contradictory statements. When we talk about the Holy Spirit we do so as if he were a distinct person, but we do that because we have no other way of talking about the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is God just as the Father and the Son are God.

Be careful not to become confused by the Trinity. We worship one God in three persons. The persons are not separate in being but they are differentiated by roles. God the Father sent Jesus to be our savior and when Jesus ascended, he sent the Holy Spirit. When we pray, we pray to the Father, through the Son, in the power of the Holy Spirit. But we pray to one God.

What is the role the Holy Spirit plays?

The first and most important role is that he came to glorify Jesus. In Jesus’ teaching about the Holy Spirit in John 16 he said
[The Holy Spirit] will glorify me, for he will take what is mine and declare it to you. 15 All that the Father has is mine; therefore I said that he will take what is mine and declare it to you.

“He will glorify me, for he will take what is mine and declare it to you.”

J. I. Packer tells the story of a beautiful cathedral in Vancouver, which is spectactularly floodlit at night. It would be crazy to visit the cathedral at night and stare into the floodlights. For one, you would probably damage your eyes and secondly, the purpose of the lights is not to be looked at but to light up the cathedral and expose its beauty in the night. In the same way, says Packer, the Holy Spirit is not given so he may bring attention to himself, but in order to expose the glory of Christ amid the dark night of sin and death. We need the Holy Spirit to illuminate Christ, but it is Christ who is the focus of our wonder.

This is why in our worship this morning, on a Sunday when we are focusing on the Holy Spirit, we sang songs of praise to Jesus. This is what the Holy Spirit wants us to do. This is why the Holy Spirit came, to lift up and bring glory to Jesus and in this sermon with an overview of the Holy Spirit, this is the thread that will connect it all.

When the church ignores the Holy Spirit, it fails to lift up Jesus and glorify him as we should.

One of the ways the Holy Spirit lifts up and glorifies Jesus is to work with us to make us more holy.

Paul wrote of two stages of salvation in his letter to the church in Rome. The first stage is justification which takes place the moment we surrender to Jesus and accept his gift of salvation. We are instantly made right in the eyes of God because the righteousness of Jesus is given to us. We are justified in the eyes of God.

The second stage begins at that moment when we are justified. The Holy Spirit is given to us as a guarantee that we have been saved and then begins to work in us to make us more like Jesus. This second stage of salvation is called sanctification and it is our responsibility to cooperate with the Holy Spirit as we are gradually transformed into the likeness of Jesus.

As we become more like Jesus, we increasingly reflect Jesus to others in our actions. People see Jesus in us and that brings him glory.

This is the work of the Holy Spirit, to bring glory to Jesus. Part of how he does this is to transform us so we more and more reflect Jesus in our lives. How does he work in our lives?

First of all, the Holy Spirit is the giver of life.

In both the Hebrew of the Old Testament and the Greek of the New Testament, the words for “breath”, “wind”, and “spirit” are the same. When you read the Bible, it helps to keep this in mind and you will pick up insights that otherwise might be missed.

The Holy Spirit was active in the beginning of creation and in Genesis 2:7 we read:
then the Lord God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature.

The Spirit breathed spirit, breath into Adam and he was created in the image of God. The image of God is not two legs, two arms, a head and shoulders and body. The image of God is the spirit that is breathed into us.

I was with my father when he died three years ago. One moment he was sitting on a chair, trying to breathe and the next he was a corpse on the floor. Even when he was sitting on the chair in his poor health, he looked alive. But almost instantly, he became a corpse with no life. The rapid change was stunning. Without spirit we are nothing.

We see this also in the vision God gave Ezekiel. (Ezekiel 37:1–14)
The hand of the Lord was upon me, and he brought me out in the Spirit of the Lord and set me down in the middle of the valley; it was full of bones.

God told Ezekiel to prophesy to the bones and as he did, the bones became connected with muscles and flesh.
8 And I looked, and behold, there were sinews on them, and flesh had come upon them, and skin had covered them. But there was no breath in them.

There were bodies but no spirit. So God told Ezekiel
“Prophesy to the breath; prophesy, son of man, and say to the breath, Thus says the Lord God: Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe on these slain, that they may live.” 10 So I prophesied as he commanded me, and the breath came into them, and they lived and stood on their feet, an exceedingly great army.

Ezekiel saw the bones become connected and flesh covered them but they were simply corpses until Ezekiel called on breath, the Spirit, to breath spirit into them.

This is a picture of what happens to us in our salvation when we call on Jesus and ask for forgiveness. It is the Holy Spirit who comes and breathes life into us. With the presence of the Holy Spirit the truths of God begin to make sense. We come to life when we are filled with the Holy Spirit.

The Holy Spirit brings us life and then in his ongoing work in us, he convicts us of sin.

How do we know in what way we need to become more like Jesus? How do we know when we have sinned? The Bible is given to us to help us know how God wants us to live. But the Holy Spirit is also at work in us to encourage us to live obedient lives.

If I asked you to close your eyes and pray with me that God would bring to mind the ways in which we have sinned, there would be for most of us a thought that would come to our mind, some situation or some action. This is the work of the Holy Spirit. This is not the same as our conscience, but the Holy Spirit uses our conscience as a tool to shape us and mold us to be more like Jesus. The Holy Spirit leads us to an awareness of sin so that we can confess our sin, make necessary changes in our behavior or attitude, and become more like Jesus.

The Holy Spirit brings us life, convicts us of sin and leads us into all truth. Jesus said in John 16:13
When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth,

There are a lot of preachers and teachers and books and blogs and magazines. Among all the things that are said and written, how are we to know what is true and what is not? How are we to distinguish between what is from God and what is merely the invention of humans?

The adult Sunday School class is listening to lectures from Gordon Fee that are helping us learn how to read the Bible and understand the truths in the Bible. It is important that we use our minds and these lectures are proving to be exceptionally helpful to us. But as Fee points out, even in commentaries, there are false understandings and we need to be able to distinguish between good and bad insights into Scripture.

The Holy Spirit guides us and leads us to the truth necessary for us to be saved and necessary for us to work with Jesus for the salvation of others. Christians do not all agree on every point, but the Spirit works to lead us into agreement on the essential truths for salvation of ourselves and others.

The Holy Spirit brings us life, convicts us of sin and leads us into truth because this is the way we become transformed into men and women who reflect Jesus in their lives. In this way Jesus is lifted up and receives glory.

As we become more like Jesus, we have more of what Paul called in Galatians, the fruit of the Spirit. (Galatians 5:22–23)
But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, 23 gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law.

The fruit of the Spirit is a description of the ways we become more like Jesus. These are not gifts given to us. The gifts of the Holy Spirit are something else. The fruit of the Spirit is the result of our cooperation with the Holy Spirit in our transformation into being more like Jesus.

An apple tree does not receive the gift of an apple. It sends roots deep into the soil and absorbs water and nutrients. It takes the rays of the sun and grows and then apples are what happen. In the same way, we are led by the Holy Spirit into conviction of sin and into truth and as we cooperate with the work of the Holy Spirit, the result is we become more patient, more kind, more faithful, more loving and so on. The fruit of the Spirit become more and more evident in our lives.

If you decide you need to have more joy in your life, the answer is not to do things to make yourself more joyful, the answer is to devote yourself to Jesus, cling to the vine and his life in you will make you a person with deeper joy.

God wants you to grow in faith and become more like Jesus but his desire for you does not stop there. God wants you to have the privilege of working with him to encourage those around you to consider faith in Jesus and to grow in knowledge of him. For this reason the Holy Spirit gives us gifts.

Each Christian receives from the Holy Spirit at least one spiritual gift. It may be caring for others, teaching, supporting and encouraging others, healing, or one of the many other gifts mentioned in the Bible.

But these are given to you; they are not the natural consequence of growing in faith and becoming more like Jesus. They are tools for you to use as you work alongside Jesus as he builds his kingdom. Spiritual gifts are given so the whole body of Christ will grow and become more like Jesus and once again, Jesus will receive glory as the church reflects who he is.

Spiritual gifts are not given to make you more important or to give you a more exalted position in the church, they are given to build up the church so that Jesus will receive more glory.

As you can tell, I am moving along quickly, giving a brief overview of the work of the Holy Spirit. If you are not familiar with the fruit of the Spirit or with spiritual gifts, then there are some excellent resources for you to study. Talk to me and I can help you with these.

My point is that spiritual gifts and all the rest of the work of the Holy Spirit is directed toward Jesus being glorified. This is the primary work of the Holy Spirit and the glorification of Jesus needs to be our focus and goal as well.

Let me speak about three warnings in the Bible about what not to do with the Holy Spirit.

The first is found in Ephesians 4:29–32
Let no corrupting talk come out of your mouths, but only such as is good for building up, as fits the occasion, that it may give grace to those who hear. 30 And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, by whom you were sealed for the day of redemption. 31 Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and slander be put away from you, along with all malice. 32 Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you.

Do not grieve the Holy Spirit.

What does Paul mean by that? Well, look at the context. The verse before talks about not allowing corrupting talk to come out of our mouths. The verse afterwards talks about putting away bitterness, wrath, anger, clamor, slander and malice. And then the next verse gives the positive. “Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you.”

When you become a follower of Jesus, you no longer travel alone. The Holy Spirit dwells with you. So wherever you go, the Holy Spirit goes with you. If you step into a meeting and are meanspirited or gossip, you bring the Holy Spirit with you into your evil behavior. If you are bitter or angry, you are bitter and angry in the presence of the Holy Spirit. And when you drag the Holy Spirit into evil behavior, you grieve the Holy Spirit. We grieve the Holy Spirit by sinning.

Paul talked about this in his letter to the church in Corinth. Prostitution was an important part of the daily life of the Corinthians. Prostitution was part of the worship at the temple to Aphrodite.  So some of the new believers thought since faith in Jesus was spiritual, it did not matter what they did with their bodies and they could continue with the cultural practice of prostitution.

But Paul wrote to them: 1 Corinthians 6:15–2
Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ? Shall I then take the members of Christ and make them members of a prostitute? Never! 16 Or do you not know that he who is joined to a prostitute becomes one body with her? For, as it is written, “The two will become one flesh.” 17 But he who is joined to the Lord becomes one spirit with him. 18 Flee from sexual immorality. Every other sin a person commits is outside the body, but the sexually immoral person sins against his own body. 19 Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God? You are not your own, 20 for you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body.

When you go to a prostitute, you drag the Holy Spirit along with you. When you have sexual relationships outside of the covenant of marriage, you do this with the Holy Spirit’s presence. Do not grieve the Holy Spirit with your sin.

When you sit down at the computer and begin clicking your way into pornographic websites, you are not alone; the Holy Spirit is being pulled along with you. Do not grieve the Holy Spirit.

When you sin, you sin against God because God is present with you and you bring God into your sin. This is why when we sin, we sin first and foremost against God. Do not grieve the Holy Spirit.

There is a second warning in Mark 3:28–30
“Truly, I say to you, all sins will be forgiven the children of man, and whatever blasphemies they utter, 29 but whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit never has forgiveness, but is guilty of an eternal sin”— 30 for they were saying, “He has an unclean spirit.”

There are a lot of Christians who are concerned with this warning because the Bible says this is the only sin for which there is not forgiveness.

One of my problems with Christians being preoccupied with this verse is that it is like stepping into a Garden of Eden, only this garden is a Garden of Sin. And God says, you can eat the fruit of any tree you want and you can be forgiven, but do not touch the one in the middle, for that one, there is no forgiveness.

It is as if Christians are saying, “Let me know which sins I can get away with and when I know which one is an absolute forbidden sin, then I will take special care to make sure I do not commit that sin.” How ridiculous.

We are to avoid all sin. All sin grieves the Holy Spirit. All sin weakens our witness for Jesus. All sin diminishes the glory of Jesus.

So what is the sin of blaspheme against the Holy Spirit? Once again, look at the context.

What were they saying about Jesus? In verse 30 they were saying Jesus had an unclean spirit. They were saying Jesus came from the devil.

The Holy Spirit came to lift up Jesus and give him glory. When someone rejects the testimony of the Holy Spirit about Jesus, they reject Jesus and to reject Jesus is to suffer the consequences of refusing the gift of salvation. Eternal separation from God, eternal hell is the consequence of rejecting Jesus.

The sin of blaspheme against the Holy Spirit is not a specific action, it is a rejection of Jesus who came to save us. So don’t refuse the gift of salvation. Grab hold with gratitude and persevere.

As to all the other behaviors for which you can receive forgiveness, resist sin. Don’t think for a moment that you can pull one over on God, that you can beat the system. God looks in your heart. He knows your deepest thoughts. Avoid any of the fruit in the Garden of Sin. Don’t grieve the Holy Spirit.

The third warning is found in     1 Thessalonians 5:19
Do not quench the Spirit.

What does this mean? Once again, look at the context.
Do not quench the Spirit. 20 Do not despise prophecies, 21 but test everything; hold fast what is good. 22 Abstain from every form of evil.

There was a problem in the church in Thessalonica with the gift of prophecy and Paul urged the church not to reject or limit the use of the gift of prophecy. He encouraged the use of the gift of discernment to make sure the prophecy was from God, but the gift was not to be discouraged.

When we set limits on what the Holy Spirit can do and cannot do, we quench the Holy Spirit. I understand there is a range of views within RIC about spiritual gifts. All I will say here is that we need everything God can give us to live our lives for him and be useful to him in his work as he builds his kingdom. So be open and trusting and ask God for every gift he has for you. If you ask him for bread he will not give you a stone.

Let me end this sermon with an encouragement.

What would have happened to you if God had reached down to you, rescued you, saved you, patted you on the back, said, “Be good. I’ll see you at the end,” and then left you to yourself? Where would you be today?

I know where I would be, back where I was before I was rescued. I am not capable of living a life pleasing to God on my own. I need help and over the years, I have been amazed at how patient God has been with me, picking me up when I have fallen, helping me once again to get on with living my life for him.

The presence of the Holy Spirit in your life is an amazing gift. This is why we are cautioned not to grieve or quench the Holy Spirit.

The Holy Spirit is with us on the most exciting adventure we could ever have. We are on our way to the Eternal City and we are not alone.

When we first surrendered to Jesus and gave him our lives, we received the gift of salvation. But there is far more in that gift than we imagined. Michael Horton, in one of the books I am using in this series of sermons on the Apostles’ Creed, points out that many Christian self-help books promise paths to spiritual power. They tell us we need to do certain things and then we will receive the power of God in our lives. But Scripture assures us that spiritual power is not our goal, it is our possession. Every believer already possesses every spiritual blessing in union with Christ.

When we received the gift of salvation, the Holy Spirit came to dwell in us. With his presence we have all the spiritual power we will ever need to live our lives with Jesus and to work alongside him as he builds his kingdom. All we need to do is dig into the present we were given and discover what we already have been given.

It is like me getting a new laptop. I open it up and begin using it but I am only using a very small part of all that it is capable of doing. The Holy Spirit helps us to find what we need and teaches us how to use what we have been given. There is so much more we are capable of than what we presently are doing. If you have given your life to Jesus, then the Holy Spirit has an incredible adventure ahead of you.

Eugene Peterson’s translation of the Bible, The Message, captures this sense of adventure that is ours when we open ourselves to the work of the Holy Spirit in our lives, when we turn from the world and are led by the Holy Spirit into God’s plan for us. (Romans 8:12–17)
12–14 So don’t you see that we don’t owe this old do-it-yourself life one red cent. There’s nothing in it for us, nothing at all. The best thing to do is give it a decent burial and get on with your new life. God’s Spirit beckons. There are things to do and places to go!
15–17 This resurrection life you received from God is not a timid, grave-tending life. It’s adventurously expectant, greeting God with a childlike “What’s next, Papa?” God’s Spirit touches our spirits and confirms who we really are. We know who he is, and we know who we are: Father and children. And we know we are going to get what’s coming to us—an unbelievable inheritance! We go through exactly what Christ goes through. If we go through the hard times with him, then we’re certainly going to go through the good times with him!

Don’t grieve the Holy Spirit by dragging him along in your sin. Don’t quench the Holy Spirit by limiting his work in your life. Cooperate with the Holy Spirit in his work to bring life to you, to open you to the full potential of the gift that was given to you when your first opened yourself to Jesus. Cooperate with the Holy Spirit and bring glory to Jesus.