Accept Jesus

Adore • Sermon • Submitted a year ago • Presented a year ago

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Reflection on Monday

Good morning Woodlands. Thank you for joining us on this - the fourth Sunday of advent - Christ is only 3 days away. It’s incredible. It’s such a season that’s marked by - well, the themes of Advent - hope, joy, peace, and love.

And yet, this was a really heavy week. Monday was a really heavy day - I don’t know about you, but it felt like a weighty personal day, even outside of the massive, unbelievable tragedy that took place in Madison, on Monday.

But then that happened, too, and my guess is that all of us have felt various mixtures of shock, and horror, and anger, and just sadness over these realities. How do we make sense of it - how do we process it all, especially in the midst of this season when we’re singing, ‘Joy to the Word’ and ‘Glory to God.’ How do we bridge these things together?

I think, almost fortuitously, on Tuesday an email list I’m part of - Breakpoint - which is a ministry founded by Chuck Colson - shared some of that writer’s - that thinker’s reflections on the devastating Tsunami that wrecked Indonesia back in 2004, right after Christmas, leaving over 200,000 dead. It was a massive tragedy, and Chuck Colson reflected on that. I think it’s worth sharing this extended quote:

Any decent person cannot help but feel overwhelmed by the enormity of the suffering caused by last month’s tsunami. The thousands of dead aren’t statistics; they are people made in the image of God — victims of a catastrophe that has spurred the world to action and left many in a state of despair. One of these people in despair is David Brooks of The New York Times. In his New Year’s Day column, he called the world’s generosity ‘amazing,’ while wondering if this response was a ‘self-enveloping fog to obscure our view of the abyss.’ The ‘abyss’ he’s referring to is the sense that nature, contrary to what the Romantics have told us, is neither ‘a nurse [nor] a friend.’ On the contrary, the events of late December remind us that, for all our technological prowess, we are subject to the natural elements, not their master.

Unlike the pre-moderns who lived with this knowledge, Brooks finds himself unable to take comfort from biblical faith. The events in South Asia left him thinking that instead of an ‘active,’ albeit mysterious, God, there was only ‘nature’s awful lottery.’ That being the case, we should not only mourn for the dead, but also for ‘those of us who have no explanation,’ wrote Brooks, referring to himself. There is, however, a Christian response to Brooks’s despair. Theologian David B. Hart wrote in The Wall Street Journal that we live in the ‘the long melancholy aftermath of a primordial catastrophe’ — the Fall, something we humans brought upon ourselves as a result of God giving us a free will and our choosing to go our way, not His. But as a result of this ‘catastrophe,’ ours is a ‘broken and wounded world.’ The ‘universe languishes in bondage to ‘powers’ and ‘principalities’ — spiritual and terrestrial — alien to God.’ We see evidence of the Fall all around us: not only in natural disasters, but in illness and death. While you don’t have to be a Christian to know that something has gone terribly wrong, you do have to be a Christian to understand God’s remedy: In His incarnation, passion, and resurrection, God’s Son both judged and rescued creation ‘from the torments of fallen nature.’ Now ‘all creation groans in anguished anticipation of the day when God’s glory will transfigure all things’ (Romans 8). Until then, says Hart, we are to ‘to hate death and waste and the imbecile forces of chance that shatter living souls’ — not in despair, as Brooks and others do, but in hope. Hard to believe? Of course it is, even for some Christians. But we continue to live by faith. And so, until the day that Christ returns and our faith is completely vindicated, we are to cling to this Gospel and preach it. Its truth and the acts of kindness and mercy it inspires are the only alternative to the abyss of despair.

I found those words blessedly comforting as I reflected on

As we move towards God’s Word, this morning, would you join me in prayer?

Pray

Introduction

Well, we’re not just going to leave that behind. I’m thankful that the passage for this week, the topic for this week, I think uniquely presses into a weightiness in this season, even in light of the joy of Christmastime.

Review past two weeks

[Personal Christmas Story]

And obviously, this time of year, we spend a lot of time talking about Jesus’ birth, and what that represents. And Jesus of course, after his birth, goes on to be this incredible teacher. And one of his teaching exchanges - perhaps one of his most intimate, but also most powerful - brings up really interesting questions about his birth. Can we sit there together for a minute? It’s John 3.