The Old, Old Story - 4 - Restored and Redeemed

Scripture: Job 42:1-6

Job 42:1–6 NIV

1 Then Job replied to the Lord: 2 “I know that you can do all things; no purpose of yours can be thwarted. 3 You asked, ‘Who is this that obscures my plans without knowledge?’ Surely I spoke of things I did not understand, things too wonderful for me to know. 4 “You said, ‘Listen now, and I will speak; I will question you, and you shall answer me.’ 5 My ears had heard of you but now my eyes have seen you. 6 Therefore I despise myself and repent in dust and ashes.”

Job 42:10–17 NIV

10 After Job had prayed for his friends, the Lord restored his fortunes and gave him twice as much as he had before. 11 All his brothers and sisters and everyone who had known him before came and ate with him in his house. They comforted and consoled him over all the trouble the Lord had brought on him, and each one gave him a piece of silver and a gold ring. 12 The Lord blessed the latter part of Job’s life more than the former part. He had fourteen thousand sheep, six thousand camels, a thousand yoke of oxen and a thousand donkeys. 13 And he also had seven sons and three daughters. 14 The first daughter he named Jemimah, the second Keziah and the third Keren-Happuch. 15 Nowhere in all the land were there found women as beautiful as Job’s daughters, and their father granted them an inheritance along with their brothers. 16 After this, Job lived a hundred and forty years; he saw his children and their children to the fourth generation. 17 And so Job died, an old man and full of years.

10/27/2024

Order of Service:

Announcements

Opening Worship

Prayer Requests

Prayer Song

Pastoral Prayer

Kid’s Time

Ministry Celebration

Offering (Doxology and Offering Prayer)

Scripture Reading

Sermon

Closing Song

Benediction

Special Notes:

Week 4: Ministry Celebration

Opening Prayer:

Almighty God,

creator of heaven and earth

in whom all things are possible,

have mercy on us and heal us,

that sustained by the power of your word

and by the constant intercession of our Lord and Savior,

we may draw near to you

and follow in your way as faithful disciples. Amen.

Restored and Redeemed

Listening

Listening is one of the most important and challenging things we do in life. When you think about school, many of the skills we pick up in childhood in elementary school become almost invisible in the work we do as adults. We don’t sound out words out loud as we read, but we learn new words every day and sound them out in our heads without even thinking about them. We work simple math problems without realizing it as we shop for groceries or plan meals. Over the years, it seems that the longer I was in school, the more my classes taught me how to be a better student, no matter the subject. One of the most important aspects of being a good student is learning to listen because without listening, we won’t learn well, and we won’t last long in this life.

Listening is difficult for us because we always have distractions. Listening to God is especially difficult and essential because no one can teach us as much as Him. God may be everywhere, and we may be able to see Him working and everything around us, but so often, it seems like everything around us tries to draw our focus away from Him. We don’t know if we should pay attention to whatever is in front of us or that small voice beside us. It’s hard to know which is God and which is the distraction.

It’s hard to know which voice belongs to God because we don’t see Him clearly with our eyes. Hearing the voice of God come from another human being or written words on a page, or maybe even our voice as we read the scripture aloud, is a strange sensation. It’s like listening to the sound of an ocean in a seashell. We hear something but know the shell cannot hold the sea inside. Neither can we, as people, hold the voice of God. And yet, He continues to speak in, to, and through us daily.

Like Job, God sees more in us than we see in ourselves. He wants to grow us into that potential. That growth involves challenges, suffering, hard work, a lot of faith, and a lot of listening. But if we persevere, God will redeem us and lead us to a better life.

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Repentance and...

We finally made it to the end.

Most people do not remember much about the Book of Job. They remember that he was a good man at the beginning. They remember he suffered incredible loss. They usually surmise that he kept the faith. And then we remember that he got more back at the end.

When we think back to the lessons we learned, especially the answers to “Why God allows suffering to happen to good people,” it’s hard to remember how this book addressed that question. It’s hard to remember because the book never answers that question. God instead responded with a question Himself, “Do you have the power and wisdom enough to run this world better than I do?” And we know the answer is we do not. So, we don’t get the answer we were looking for from this book.

Anyone who has suffered significant loss might also be disappointed in this book. The old saying goes that a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. However, God teaches us just the opposite in Job. Ultimately, Job lost everything in his hands and gained back double. So, we who have lost ask, “Why did he have to lose it in the first place? Wasn’t he just as good with half the wealth?” And more than that, what about his family? People are not replaceable in the same way as money, land, and livestock.

This final chapter tells us that Job repented and sat in ashes again. We usually understand repentance is the appropriate response to sin. But we are hard-pressed to determine the sin in Job’s life that he needed to repent. Indeed, we lose the book’s point if it turns out that Job was a sinner, just like everybody else. But if we try to look for Job’s rap sheet, we’ll come up empty-handed. The scripture says he was righteous, as good or better than anyone else who lived. If we’re going to think about the sin that he had to repent from, his sin was that he simply was not good enough. He had room to improve.

And that’s it right there. He needed to grow. And to grow, he needed to listen. To listen and hear God, he needed to repent from the very organized, in-control, righteous life he was living. Like Abram in the land of Ur, there was nothing wrong with his life other than it was not the life God wanted for him. And I think this shows us an essential piece of repentance that we often forget.

For us, repentance is too often a means to an end. It’s what we do to get forgiveness so we can stop feeling guilty and go back to living our lives. Sometimes, we step it up and say that repentance brings transformation, usually implying we go back to our lives as nicer people. Again, I think we are way off a biblical understanding of repentance. In the Old and New Testament scripture, repentance marks a change of allegiance. It’s like switching your citizenship or changing your religion. It means you’re letting go of something entirely and heading towards something new.

Job was not going to let go of his land and livestock, and he certainly was not going to let go of his family. But after they were taken from him, he needed to let go and grieve what he had lost. He needed to repent to move forward and grow into the potential that God saw in him.

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Grieving Together

We want to get to the end of the story, where Job is blessed again. We can’t call it a reward because it is all a gift from God. But I think there are two crucial points that we need to take away from this ending.

First, Job does not receive this gift from God until he forgives his friends and offers sacrifices to God on their behalf for their sins against God and himself. Job’s blessing is withheld until he attempts to restore those relationships.

Can you imagine how his friends felt, seeing Job do this on their behalf? That acts to touch their minds and their hearts in ways that accusations never could. So when they saw Job return to his place of grief, they joined him and offered him their condolences. They brought him gold and silver, which could have been a way of saying they were sorry for what they had done. And it probably didn’t hurt that it helped provide for Job, who had lost everything.

We don’t hear about the years between these final verses. But those silver coins and gold rings were a gift to Job that he knew he had not earned. While he must have been a good manager for all that he earned in the past, he was living a new life now and recognizing that everything was a gift of God. As they grieved together, Job realized that there was more God had given him, and much more God wanted to give him.

We can get about halfway there when we grieve by ourselves. But to understand what it means to be stewards of God‘s blessings, we must grow to celebrate our joys and mourn our sorrows together. And what’s more, we have to learn to do all that with those we like the most as well as those we like the least.

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Restored and Redeemed

Secondly, when Job‘s blessing finally arrives, it says he received twice as much as before. This shows us that God knew Job could handle twice as many blessings as before. And there’s an essential change in this as well. In that area, age, and culture, women and children were often regarded more as property than as people. Job‘s wife is never named, nor his former children. But here, in the end, it says that he had three daughters, given names (Jemimah, Keziah, and Keren-Happuch) that were passed down through the centuries.

Moreover, they were given an inheritance right along with their unnamed brothers. That act alone signifies a shift in how Job viewed every blessing he received from God. The morals and culture of the world around him were no longer good enough, because he knew firsthand that everything he had was a gift from God that he should be grateful for and good to. Job raised the standard of goodness above the world around him and his former life, reaching out into new territory that would not be followed for thousands of years. Job didn’t care what the world thought. He knew it belonged to God anyway and would treat it that way.

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Stewards of the Blessing

Job teaches us to seek God for guidance after repentance. Saying sorry and staying put is not repentance. I’ve done it, you’ve done it, we’ve all had our sorry, not sorry moments that we went through to get through a moment so we could get back to living the life we chose for ourselves. But that doesn’t make it right. And here’s what I’m learning from Job’s story. While God is always interested in what is right and wrong, He is also interested in other things. When God finally speaks in this book, He doesn’t lecture Job and his friends about the difference between right and wrong. Instead, God shows Job How complex all of creation is. Job may have gotten things right most of the time and offered sacrifices for forgiveness for the time he messed up, keeping him in the right relationship with God. But he still had room to grow.

The list of expectations for newborn babies is pretty tiny. It fits their size and age, and most of it concerns eating and sleeping regularly. When they become toddlers, our expectations grow with them. We want to see them move, we want to hear them begin to talk, and we want them to learn to express themselves in ways other than crying. A perfect baby’s behavior is inappropriate for a child getting ready to start school. We could say the same about the difference between 10-year-olds, 20-year-olds, 40-year-olds, and 80-year-olds, and every age in between. God meant for us to grow and change, maturing from one picture of goodness to the next, moving from grace to grace, and not expecting our past behavior to carry us into tomorrow. God wants to carry us into tomorrow because tomorrow is a gift that will grow us further than we are today.

So, how do we grow to become those stewards of God‘s blessing? We know God’s blessing will never run out. He will never stop giving us gifts. So we will never stop growing. That means we take things one day at a time on our good days and bad. We may take things one minute at a time on our more brutal days. And we receive them from God with all grace and gratitude, repenting when we receive it poorly and seeking his hand to provide for us when we have received more than we can carry ourselves.

It’s more than saying, “Jesus, take the wheel.” Letting God lead us through life is not a passive act. Jesus did not go to his disciples and say let me lead. He said, “Follow me.” Following Jesus means getting out of your car and taking intentional steps toward Him. Often, that means walking away from something good and towards Jesus as He takes you to something better. The Devil may also tempt us to do that, telling us the grass is greener on the other side and tempting us to follow what feels good, leaving our responsibilities behind. When we follow Jesus, though, just like Job, we often discover that the place He leads us is not greener. It does not satisfy our desires or make us feel more comfortable than where we are. Instead, it is a place that stretches us, changes us, and grows us to be more and to love more like Him.

Where is God stretching you today?

Are you following Jesus there intentionally or waiting for Him to pull you to and through it?

Are you going through this by yourself, or are you sharing your burden with those around you as they share theirs with you?

We may never be perfect stewards of God‘s blessing, at least in this lifetime here on earth. But if we follow Jesus and trust Him to watch over and provide for us, He can grow us into good stewards.

Closing Prayer

Lord, you are so good to us. We don’t deserve the blessings you have given us, but we are grateful that you entrust them to us. Help us listen and follow where you lead. Help us to see your hand that provides for us and to receive from you with grace and gratitude. Help us to have grace with ourselves when we fail you and to believe and know that you can always do more through us if we trust and follow you. In Jesus name, amen.

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This next month we are going to be focusing on Extravagant Generosity. Each week we will be focusing on a different way to be grateful. To help us do that we have some tools to give you today. As you leave the service you will be given a packet with our November newsletter, a devotional guide that starts tomorrow and a heart card with instructions. Make sure you see us before you leave today and pick up your copy.