Not Always Successful, But Always Faithful.
Notes
Transcript
Illustrations for Biblical Preaching Perseverance
A teenager had decided to quit high school, saying he was just fed up with it all. His father was trying to convince him to stay with it. “Son,” he said, “you just can’t quit. All the people who are remembered in history didn’t quit. Abe Lincoln, he didn’t quit. Thomas Edison, he didn’t quit. Douglas MacArthur, he didn’t quit. Elmo McCringle . . .”
“Who?” the son burst in. “Who’s Elmo McCringle?”
“See,” the father replied, “you don’t remember him. He quit.”
Lord God, bless Your Word wherever it is proclaimed. Make it a Word of power and peace to convert those not yet Your own and to confirm those who have come to saving faith. May Your Word pass from the ear to the heart, from the heart to the lip, and from the lip to the life that, as You have promised, Your Word may achieve the purpose for which You send it, through Jesus Christ our Lord, Amen.
“Because he holds fast to me in love, I will deliver him; I will protect him, because he knows my name. When he calls to me, I will answer him; I will be with him in trouble; I will rescue him and honor him. With long life I will satisfy him and show him my salvation.”
God is faithful in His commitment to His Church; He watched as generation after generation grew further and further away from Him, but He never turned His back on the children of Adam and Eve. In the promised time, He sent His Son to redeem us from the curse of the Law. Faithfully, God acted in lovingkindness to bring deliverance to His creation as He had promised in the aftermath of the Fall in the Garden.
Jeremiah was a witness to God’s promise:
And the word of the Lord came to me, saying, “Jeremiah, what do you see?” And I said, “I see an almond branch.” Then the Lord said to me, “You have seen well, for I am watching over my word to perform it.”
The Hebrew word for almond - “sha -KHED”- sounds almost the same as the word for watching - “sha-KHAD.” Just like I don’t fully understand the relationship between almonds and intensity, I don’t fully understand the relationship between God’s faithfulness and ours. I only know this, we will never be more faithful to God than He is to us. As the old song goes, “You can’t been God giving no matter how hard you try!”
Our Gospel text begins near the beginning of Matthew 10. In verse 5, Jesus issues instructions to the 12 that they would find easy to carry out, since they fit right in with the way that they had been taught to avoid interactions with both groups:
These twelve Jesus sent out, instructing them, “Go nowhere among the Gentiles and enter no town of the Samaritans,
Knowing the desires that could be found in Judea and Galilee for the coming of the Messiah, the Disciples could not be blamed if they thought that their message would be embraced much more by the “lost sheep of the house of Israel,” the ones to whom the promise had been given, but in Matt 10:16, Jesus gives them the information that showed the reality of their situation:
“Behold, I am sending you out as sheep in the midst of wolves, so be wise as serpents and innocent as doves.
Not even family ties will be enough to give them an opportunity to experience the sweet taste of successful ministry. The taste of victory comes only to those who don’t allow the circumstances to rob them of Christ’s promise:
Brother will deliver brother over to death, and the father his child, and children will rise against parents and have them put to death, and you will be hated by all for my name’s sake. But the one who endures to the end will be saved.
This entire passage, today’s Gospel reading of Matthew 10:5; 21-33 is tough to listen to if you think that Sunday morning is supposed to give you sweet comforting words to pick up back up after a bruising weak of resisting the world, the flesh, and the devil. For those of you who looked to my arrival as the beginning of the great turnaround from “faithful little flock” to “the hot new church in Lansing,” I can tell you that those words were not given to me in either my prayers or in the Call documents from the joint call committee. I do not know what God’s plan for this community is or where this congregation fits into it. I do know that it is God, according to 1 Tim 2:4,
who desires all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth.
God has made us to be a Kingdom of priests, and it is the vocation of priests to intercede for the community of which they are a part. We are called to pray, not only for ourselves or our immediate friends and families, but as Paul wrote in exhortation to Timothy:
First of all, then, I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for all people, for kings and all who are in high positions, that we may lead a peaceful and quiet life, godly and dignified in every way. This is good, and it is pleasing in the sight of God our Savior,
The mission of God is not only dependent upon the Apostles, who gave themselves to the ministry of the Word, it depends upon the entire body, giving itself to prayer, along with the Apostles. We pray for peace, not because we are tired of strife or we are afraid of our enemies, but because God said that “this is good and pleasing” in His sight that we do so.
Paul’s words to Timothy apply to preachers, but also to the rest of the household of faith.
preach the word; be ready in season and out of season; reprove, rebuke, and exhort, with complete patience and teaching.
We don’t know when God will bring a Gospel shower into the vineyard where we labor, when Spirit will blow and bring the dead bones and still corpses to life and immortality through the Gospel. We are not all evangelists, but we are all saints, called by God out of darkness into His marvelous light.
Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal body, to make you obey its passions. Do not present your members to sin as instruments for unrighteousness, but present yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life, and your members to God as instruments for righteousness. For sin will have no dominion over you, since you are not under law but under grace.
493 years ago on June 25, 1530, Philip Melanchthon, along with German leaders who supported the work of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther, presented the Augsburg Confession to the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. They did not seek a confrontation with the Emperor, or with Pope Clement VII, nor was their goal to bring to shame or contempt those who thought that they were motivated to bring about division in the Body of Christ. Instead, they only sought to show, in the first 21 Articles of the Augsburg Confession, that they being faithful to the historic teachings of the Church from the Fathers, and that in the last 7 Articles that they simply wanted to undo changes that had the effect of obscuring the pure Gospel of Christ.
In the same spirit that Jesus sent the 12, knowing that God is not the author of confusion, but of peace, the German princes and teacher Philip Melanchthon, bore Luther’s teaching to Augsburg. Today, in that same Spirit, not for destruction, but for edification, we bring the pure Gospel to our friends, our neighbors, our co-workers, and to all whom the Lord grants us an opportunity. God is pleased with this labor, for it is His mission to reconcile the World to Himself through the precious blood of Jesus Christ, His Son, our Lord. The cross upon which Christ suffered, bled, and died, is the ground upon which the Church stands in each generation, to this day, proclaiming the unsearchable riches of Christ. There is no other message that can bring healing, wholeness, deliverance, reconciliation, and peace. We have nothing to add to the words, Christ is for YOU! There is no other name given under heaven whereby we must be saved, and there is no bride other than the Bride of Christ through whom the Children of God can be brought to birth, nurtured in the True Faith, and shepherded to eternal life.
Christ justified you by His death, and He sends you forth as His witnesses by His resurrection power and authority. It doesn’t matter how the world responds, for everything that resists Him will be brought to destruction, to the praise of His glorious grace. “The one who endures to the end will be saved,” not the one who never experiences difficulties, because God is enabling you to endure, if you look unto Jesus, the Author and Finisher of our faith. It’s a hard road, but Jesus walked it before you, and now goes with you, with the Father and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever.
And the peace of God that passes all understanding will guard your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus our Lord, Amen.