What If Mom and Dad Were Right?

THIS MESSY LIFE: BECOMING AN ADULT - PART 4

WHAT IF MOM AND DAD WERE RIGHT?
Sunday, November 24, 2019
2 Kings 22:1-10 (14-20), 23:1-3

Go and ask the Lord on my behalf, and on behalf of the people, and on behalf of all Judah concerning the contents of this scroll that has been found. The Lord must be furious with us because our ancestors failed to obey the words of this scroll and do everything written in it about us…

…Because your heart was broken and you submitted before the Lord when you heard what I said about this place and its citizens—that they will become a horror and a curse—and because you ripped your clothes and cried before me, I have listened to you, declares the Lord. That’s why I will gather you to your ancestors, and you will go to your grave in peace. You won’t experience the disaster I am about to bring on this place.

2 Kings 22:13, 19-20

Sometimes you can’t outrun consequences. Sometimes we look at all the things we’ve done in life to try to make up for our mistakes, to repent, to seek forgiveness from those we’ve hurt, to make amends, and none of it seems to matter. We still have regrets. Some relationships are never fully reconciled. The things we have lost by our own poor choices may never be regained. We may let go and move forward having learned many valuable lessons, but the consequences stay with us no matter what.

By the time we get to King Josiah, the consequences of Israel’s sin were certain. Nothing could stop the coming disaster of exile they would face. The wheels were already in motion. Yet in 2 Kings 22:20 we read that Josiah will not experience the disaster that is coming. Somehow the consequences will be delayed and he will be spared. Why?

If we go back to verse 13 we see that Josiah’s priest came across a scroll in the process of renovating and cleaning out the temple. Some have said this is the scroll of Deuteronomy while others say it only includes a partial list of the God’s instructions, but either way, this scroll clearly contained the Word of the Lord. What’s more, Josiah quickly realizes that the people have not obeyed these particular instructions for quite some time. “The Lord must be furious with us,” he says, “because our ancestors failed to obey.”

Josiah’s reforms do not ultimately prevent the exile, but his faithfulness to this re-discovered law spared him and potentially his entire generation from suffering the worst of those consequences. At least for a short time, Josiah broke the cycle of sin and idolatry that previous generations had perpetuated.

Most of us have had moments in our adult lives when we look back and realize our parents were right about more than we care to admit. That doesn’t mean they were always right, and sometimes like Josiah, we may have to go back a few generations to find a faithful role model for our spiritual lives. We may even have to look to other families. Regardless of the source, Josiah reminds us that we are not the first generation trying to figure out how the Scriptures apply to our everyday lives. There are many lessons to be learned from the past, both in how to live and how not to live. For Josiah, the first lesson was how not to live. We cannot continue in the idolatry of our ancestors. And yet in the scroll he discovered the promises of God that dated back generations and he came to understand that those promises were just as real in his day as they ever had been. God is faithful in every generation.

We may not be able to stop the decline of a denomination or even a congregation. We may not be able to prevent the exile that is already in process. But we can choose how we will live in the face of these consequences. For ourselves, our families, our communities and our generation, we can choose life, so that our descendants might live faithfully in the place God has for them. No matter what consequences haunt us from our past, we can choose this day to serve the Lord.

I call heaven and earth as my witnesses against you right now: I have set life and death, blessing and curse before you. Now choose life—so that you and your descendants will live — by loving the Lord your God, by obeying his voice, and by clinging to him. That’s how you will survive and live long on the fertile land the Lord swore to give to your ancestors: to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

Deuteronomy 30:19-20

So now, revere the Lord. Serve him honestly and faithfully. Put aside the gods that your ancestors served beyond the Euphrates and in Egypt and serve the Lord. But if it seems wrong in your opinion to serve the Lord, then choose today whom you will serve. Choose the gods whom your ancestors served beyond the Euphrates or the gods of the Amorites in whose land you live. But my family and I will serve the Lord.

Joshua 24:14-15

Click here to listen to entire sermon series - “THIS MESSY LIFE: BECOMING AN ADULT”

Starting Over

THIS MESSY LIFE: BECOMING AN ADULT - PART 3

STARTING OVER
Sunday, November 17, 2019
Isaiah 5:1-7, 11:1-5; Mark 12:1-3

What more was there to do for my vineyard that I haven’t done for it? When I expected it to grow good grapes, why did it grow rotten grapes?

Isaiah 5:4

Let’s start this week with a reality check. We have all produced rotten grapes.

Now that that is out of the way, we can deal with the real issues around this beautiful and yet painful song of God’s vineyard. The question in verse 4 is the crux. The owner of the vineyard asks, “What more could I have done?”

There is no answer.

If we don’t begin with the confession that we have produced rotten grapes, it becomes very easy to look out all of those “other people” outside of the church and pose this question to them. To the atheist we may ask, “What more could God do to make you believe?” To the criminal we can ask, “What more could God do to make you repent?” To the younger generation who appears to have bailed on church and who we love to use as a scapegoat for all the problems of the world, we might ask, “What more could God do to get you to appreciate how good you have it and come back to church?”

If we want to use the Bible as a weapon, this is a great question to start with. It can be framed in so many different ways but no matter what we end up with the same conclusion. In summary, it goes something like this.

1. In Christ, God did everything possible to show us how much we are loved.

2. We, the good “Christian” people, responded appropriately to that love by “believing in the name of Jesus” and “getting saved.”

3. All of those “unsaved” people have rejected God’s love and there is no excuse. They deserve whatever they get.

We probably would not say it so bluntly, but think about the implications of the way we live our lives. Do we spend more time showing love to those outside the church or complaining about the way we think they live? After we “got saved,” how have we actually taken up our crosses and followed Christ as his disciples? How are we making disciples of others and fulfilling the Great Commission?

The songwriter in Isaiah does not explicitly say that the owner of the vineyard is God. The first explicit hint we get comes at the end of verse 6 when the owner commands the clouds not to rain on the vineyard. Only God has authority over the rain. Until this point, it would be easy to accuse anybody else of bearing rotten grapes and offending such an incredible caretaker.

But by verse 7 we see that this vineyard which fails to bear good fruit is not the “other.” It is the house of Israel and the people of Judah in whom God delighted. Let us not become so overconfident in our own privileged position as “God’s children” that we forget to take responsibility for our own failures before God.

Perhaps we as a church should spend less time criticizing everyone else’s vineyard and start realizing that God has allowed the thorns and thistles to grow up and choke out our own branches.

What more could God do indeed?

What more can God do to convince us that we are the ones failing to produce the good fruit he has for us to bear for the sake of the world?

Click here to listen to entire sermon series - “THIS MESSY LIFE: BECOMING AN ADULT”

When All Seems Lost

THIS MESSY LIFE: BECOMING AN ADULT - PART 2

WHEN ALL SEEMS LOST
Sunday, November 10, 2019
Hosea 11:1-9, Mark 10:3-14

How can I give you up, Ephraim?
How can I hand you over, Israel?
How can I make you like Admah?
How can I treat you like Zeboiim?
My heart winces within me;
my compassion grows warm and tender.

Hosea 11:8

Can I be honest?

I have a love/hate relationship with the prophets in scripture.

On one hand I love that they cut straight the heart. They don’t mix words. They tell it like it is and they declare God’s truth without concern for what anybody else thinks of them. Their courage and faithfulness is the stuff of legend.

This is all fine and good, so long as they are just shouting down those idolatrous people in ancient Israel. Those people knew better. How many miracles did God do for their ancestors in Egypt? How many times did God bail them out of a tight spot in battle? How could they forget the one who brought them out of slavery and made them into a great nation at the center of the world, a city on a hill that would shine the light of God’s glory as far as the eye could see and live as a blessing to all the nations? To these people, the harsh words of the prophets seem perfectly reasonable.

Like the older brother watching the young prodigal come home, we want dad to really lay into him. “Give him what he deserves for abandoning you and our family and squandering all of your gifts for his own selfish pleasure.”

Only dad doesn’t respond the way we might want him to. This is where the prophets become difficult. Sometimes those harsh words are directed at me, or at us. Sometimes we, who think we have been so good staying faithful to God and living in his household all this time, are really the ones who need a wake up call. The prophets remind us how much we have taken for granted and how much we have missed the point of what God has called us to do and who God has called us to be for the sake of others.

Then we come to Hosea. Of all the prophets Hosea is arguably one of the most gut-wrenching and emotional prophets of the bunch. He stops at nothing to pull our heart strings until we can’t help but weep not only for the people of Israel, but for ourselves as we see how far God will go to bring us back home, even when we have “played the whore” as Hosea’s wife does more than once.

In the beginning of Hosea we cannot grasp the extent of God’s grace modeled by the prophet as he literally buys his wife back from slave auction after her own unfaithfulness put her there in the first place. By the time we get to chapter 11, the image shifts from a broken and painful marriage to a parent who is crushed by his or her child’s outright and continual rejection.

If this scene were played out on the silver screen, there would not be a dry eye in the house. But Hosea isn’t simply trying to make us cry so he can win an Oscar. He’s reminding us who we are and who God is and he is helping us understand why the prophet’s words to Israel and to us seem so harsh.

The prophet’s anger is not the anger of wrath or vengeance, but the anger, the frustration, and the desperation of the broken and agonizing heart of a mother or father overflowing with love for their wayward son or daughter.

This is the cry of our heavenly Father / Mother:

“How can I give you up?”

How can I make you understand the depth of my compassion and love?

What will it take for you to come home?

Click here to listen to entire sermon series - “THIS MESSY LIFE: BECOMING AN ADULT”