SERMON FOR NOVEMBER 30, 2008
CHRIST IS COMING: WATCH AND WAIT FOR THE LORD
SERMON THEME: Why Don’t You Come Down?
SERMON TEXT: Isaiah 63: 16b; 64:1-8
O LORD, are our Father. Our Redeemer from of old is your name. Why, O LORD, do you make us wander from your ways and harden our hearts so we do not revere you? Return for the sake of your servants, the tribes that are your inheritance.
Oh, that you would rend the heavens and come down, that the mountains would tremble before you! As when fire sets twigs ablaze and causes water to boil, come down to make your name known to your enemies and cause the nations to quake before you! For when you did awesome things that we did not expect, you came down, and the mountains trembled before you. Since ancient times no one has heard, no ear has perceived, no eye has seen any God besides you, who acts on behalf of those who wait for him. You come to the help of those who gladly do right, who remember your ways.
But when we continued to sin against them, you were angry. How then can we be saved? All of have become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous acts are like filthy rags; we all shrivel up like a leaf, and like the wind our sins sweep us away. No one calls on your name or strives to lay hold of you; for you have hidden your face from us and made us waste away because of our sins.
Yet, O LORD, you are our Father. We are the clay, you are the potter; we are all the work of your hand.
Today’s Scripture is in the form of a prayer offered by Isaiah, reflecting the thoughts of the Jews while in exile in Babylon…the sermon will follow similar format. (Israel) – “WHY DON’T YOU COME DOWN?” Your people are oppressed, enduring hardship and injustice. We are your people, Lord! “You, O Lord, are our Father, our Redeemer from of old is your name.” And yet you turn away “Why, O Lord, do you make us wander from your ways and harden our hearts so we do not revere you?” We’re not questioning or accusing, just trying to understand.
Come down, as you did in days of old – come down with power to punish your enemies. You did it at Sodom and Gomorrah. Come down like you did at the Red Sea. Come down like you did at Jericho. Do it again, Lord! Oh, that you would rend the heavens and come down, that the mountains would tremble before you! As when fire sets twigs ablaze and causes water to boil, come down to make your name known to your enemies and cause the nations to quake before you! For when you did awesome things that we did not expect, you came down, and the mountains trembled before you. There is no God like you, a God who acts on behalf of his people.
Today our lament is rather the same. Lord, why don’t you come down? Your people are oppressed. They’re suffering hardship, and injustice, sickness, difficulty of every kind. Lord, we’re in a society that accepts every religion and faith as valid and tolerable, except the one true faith, the one whereby we worship you. Our culture worships the creature, not the Creator. Money, sexuality, power, prestige, have taken first place in the human heart. Lord, the journey here is so hard. It is long, and difficult. We get weary. We get discouraged. We get tired. And yet“our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world, and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.”(Ephesians 6:12) Our struggle, Lord, isn’t so much against flesh and blood enemies, people we can see, but Satan and sin and death, so Lord come down! Come down and show your power, crush your enemies and rescue your people.
Even as we ask you to do that, we know the answer. You come to the help of those who gladly do right, who remember your ways. But when we continued to sin against them, you were angry. How then can we be saved? God’s not the problem. God is not unjust or unfair. He’s not sitting on his hands enjoying the sight of his people in anguish. We do the same thing those Old Testament Israelites did. We put the onus and the blame on God for our circumstance. Remember the passage we read earlier? Why, O LORD, do you make us wander from your ways and harden our hearts so we do not revere you? The audacity of that! Lord, why do you wander away from us? Why do you harden our hearts? Who does the wandering, first? Who does the hardening, first? Does God get up on a Sunday and say, “You know these people? I’m sick of you! You’re done!” No! Who wanders, first? Who hardens, first? The Israelites did! Not God! And today---who wanders and who hardens? It’s us! It’s you and me! It’s not God! Our sins turn him away. Our sins cause him to confirm our hardness of heart, and then God basically says in effect, “If that’s how you want to be, ok! So be it! Live it up, but you will not live with me!”
As much as we’d like to overlook, and to downplay, and to minimize our sinfulness, this powerful scripture does not allow us to do that. It’s a familiar one, You, O LORD, All of us have become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous acts are like filthy rags; we all shrivel up like a leaf, and like the wind our sins sweep us away. We are by nature unclean, infected with sin as thoroughly as a leper with incurable leprosy. And even our righteous acts, the things that we scrape together, the things that we do, that we think are pretty good, that ought to impress God, if they are not done with right motivation, they are not done with the heart of faith. They are done, with a heart filled with un-repentance. Sin, they’re like filthy rags! And we love to look at the original languages and see the pictures of redemption and salvation, and grace that are here, but we also have to look at the ugly pictures too, filthy rags. Literally, in the Old Testament Hebrew, this is a reference to menstrual rags, stained with blood.
We can be clean and showered and look great on the outside. We can be morally good and upright. We’re all in church here on Sunday morning. There’s football going on, and yet, we’re all here in church? But as the wind blows away dry shriveled up leaves, so our sins sweep us away to destruction. No one calls on your name or strives to lay hold of you; for you have hidden your face from us and make us waste away because of our sins.
So maybe we want to change the sermon theme. Maybe we want to be careful for what we ask for. Maybe we don’t want God to come down with power to punish. Instead with Isaiah, let’s not ask for justice, or righteousness. Let’s plead for mercy! We don’t have a chance for justice. You, O LORD, are our Father, our Redeemer from of old is your name. O LORD, you are our Father. We are the clay, you are the potter; we are all the work of your hand. We are all the work of your hand. Lord we owe our existence to you, as clay in the hands of a potter. Your purpose for us, as we’ve seen it here, in the scriptures, is for you, Lord, to give us your grace, for your glory. So Lord, we beg of you, on that basis---Why don’t you come down and redeem us? Why don’t you come down and save us, because we need saving.
That name Redeemer, in the entire Old Testament, occurs eighteen times. Thirteen times it is found in the book of Isaiah, and this is the very last time here, in Chapter 63. And the other key name for God here is, Father, which occurs twice in these verses, three times if we read the first half of Verse 16, which we did not. Only fifteen times in the Old Testament is God referred to as Father, but it is on the basis of those names that Isaiah, and we, appeal for mercy.
God has come down. He has come down with power. Isaiah and others foretold it. Christ Jesus fulfilled it. Christ came down in power, but not the kind of power that once made the earth shake at Mt.Sinai, or the destructive power of the flood, or the fire that came down on Sodom. The heavens were bright the night he was born, because of the angel choir. But Christ Jesus came into this world very quietly, very humbly, naked, helpless, a tiny baby, born to a virgin, in a humble stable, with an animal feed trough for his first bed. Christ came down to be one of us, and to be everything that we are not, and still be human, perfect and sinless, and righteous. He came not to bare his arm of terrifying power, to show the world just how strong he is. No! He came to bare his back to those who would beat him. He came to bear everything that’s wrong with the world, everything that’s wrong with us, the curse, and guilt, and the wages of sin, death. He carried it all, for all, on the cross. And when Christ died the earth shook, the curtain in the temple was torn in two, graves opened up, releasing for a time their dead. And three days after Christ’s death, his own grave was opened up, and Satan’s been quaking and shaking ever since.
Lord, thank you!!! You have come down! You have come down with power to crush your enemies. You have come to rescue us, and we are assured of your presence. Lord, lead us to repent daily, and to cling to you for your grace and your forgiveness, and Lord, use us according to your purpose. We are the clay, you are the potter; we are all the work of your hands.
Today is the beginning of a new year, a new church year. It’s Advent, a new season! So the colors change, and we’ve got the Advent candles up, and just a few weeks until Christmas. It’s the Advent season. Advent is about waiting, and we don’t like to wait! Four o’clock in the morning is not early enough to push down a Wal-mart door to get into the store, to see what they might have. We don’t like to wait for traffic. We don’t like to wait, kids, for Christmas, and adults, for Christmas to be over. We don’t like to wait! But Advent is a time of waiting, in between, waiting. The first Advent, the first coming of Christmas, is done. And we wait for the second Advent, his coming on the last day. It is fast approaching, closer every day, but it is an active waiting, and it’s active in two ways.
I’ll illustrate the first this way. On an early Sunday morning, during the days of popularity of President Franklin Roosevelt, the phone rang in the office of the church where the president often attended. The minister picked up and heard a voice inquire, “Tell me Sir, do you expect the president to be in church today?” Well, that I cannot promise,” said the minister, “But we do expect God to be there, and that ought to be reason enough to attend.”
No matter how busy we get - and we are so busy, we have “to do lists!” We’re walking “to do lists” as we get to Christmas. And then what happens when Christmas is over? We are still walking “to do lists.” We are busy, but we need to be in the Word. Not---Oh! I didn’t have time for it today! I’ll try tomorrow! It must be a priority! Bible study, personal devotions! No one can make you do this stuff. No one comes to your house and says, “Hey! Have you read the Word? Have you prayed today? Have you had a devotion today?” Worship!!! We have week-end worship, in abundance. We have mid-week worship, all month long, a great way to stay in focus, to keep the priority straight, to be in the Word. No one can tell you to do that, but we need to be, not so much because we have to. We want to! We want to hear the voice of our loving Father. We need to know of grace and mercy brought by our Redeemer.
The second aspect of active waiting is just that---to be active. Sounds like a contradiction in terms---Active?---Waiting?--- Like telling a five year old to wait for an hour, or even for five minutes, for something to happen. But think about this! If you are waiting for an important telephone call, today, and the person whose calling says, “I’ll call you at home, not on your cell, but at home this afternoon. What time? I don’t know! This afternoon! So between noon and 5:00 PM---you’re at home and you’re waiting! How will you wait? You could sit on the couch and watch TV, and fight over the remote control! That’s one way to wait! If you are Type A, you will probably get up and do things, and clean, and fix, and pick up, and put away. And that is more in line with what God would say is an active waiting, being busy, because we are the clay. He is the potter. We are the works of his hands. He has formed us for His purpose, for His glory.
So as we wait, we have the command to be busy, and we have the promise that Jesus is coming soon. And the Apostle Paul combines both of those in our second reading, Therefore you do not lack any spiritual gift, as you eagerly wait for our Lord Jesus Christ to be revealed. He will keep you strong to the end, so that you will be blameless on the day of our Lord Jesus Christ. God who has called you into fellowship with His son, Jesus Christ our Lord is faithful.
Lord, why don’t you come down? But come down when you know the time is right! And when you come, by your grace, we will be watching, and we will be waiting. Amen.
Pastor Stephen Luchterhand
Phoenix, Arizona