Sunday Sermon

 

 Jewels

 Isaiah 49:18
Look up and look around you.  All your children are gathering to return to you.  The Lord says, “As surely as I live, your children will be like jewels that a bride wears proudly.”

A hobby of mine is all about pushing little plastic soldiers around on a table to fight battles both historical and imagined. We call what we do miniature war gaming and it is a great learning tool to help people understand decision making and to see the effects that those choices have in a non-substantial environment. When I teach new people about our hobby, I have a saying I use to help people learn about missing what is important. I say, “Sometimes we get so caught up in killing alligators that we forget that our job is to drain the swamp.” The idea is that we start doing something that might be helpful but misses the point. You don’t have to kill the alligators if you drain the swamp because the alligators will just leave. This of course leads me into dealing with our faith and how we build a trust in the living God. In the teaching God gives us there is a clear central idea that runs through it all and that is that God is the maker of all things and He is a God who loves us and always does the right thing. Looking at this we could sum all of that in a shorter statement saying that God is truth. Everything God teaches and all the things Jesus preaches about points to the fact that all truth radiates from God. Focusing on that is not easy because we do not live by the truth in our lives and to learn to embrace truth in our lives means we are going to have to admit we are not what we should be. By avoiding the truth we end up doing other things that seem helpful but miss the point of what we are here for. It is so easy to try and be righteous or to work at being loving and those are good things but if we first don’t stand on the truth of God those things are not worth anything. When we embrace the truth of God we will naturally become people who do right and who love people. Developing a trust in the God who is the truth and seeking Him will make us people who treat others like we should and it will empower us to be strong and helpful in a world that needs us to be the people God calls us to be. We will not have to worry about sin in our lives when we seek God because He will teach us about our sin not to destroy us but to bring healing to us. There will be a call on our lives by God to speak to people about their sin because the truth of God will make us do it but we will do it in the loving and caring manor God speaks to us about our sin. If we are to be the people God calls us to be we have understand what God calls us to. Faith does not mean we follow some rules about how to live but we learn how to live because the truth of our God will compel us to live in the right way. Let the truth of God be what we trust in because that is the nature of God and when we do that everything else will fall into life God wants it to have.

As minister of the Gospel of Jesus Christ the thing that troubles me most is how broken we as humans are. I don’t know if God gifted me the sight to see the brokenness in people or if because I am broken I can see other broken people. The one thing I do know is that the answer to what is damaged inside of us is not to seek validation for ourselves but to seek the God who can fix what is broken in us. The God who created the universe longs to fix the things in us that have been broken by our sin and the sin of others. What is really important is that God knows what happens if we let those hurts and pains that are in our lives go unrepaired. Nothing broken left alone will get better and like a rock in our shoe all those things that seem so small will wreck us at some point. Our God knows how bad things can get and that we can be destroyed by the things in our lives that are not right. Over and over Jesus speaks about sin and how terrible it is but He does it to save us from the results of sin. A great example is the woman at the well. Jesus knows who this woman is and also knows how broken she is. Nothing is working in this woman’s life but if she admits to the truth of how broken she is it will destroy her. But then Jesus comes and speaks of hope in the face of sin and redemption instead of destruction and the woman can finally find relief instead of pain. Jesus offers both the confrontation with sin and the hope that the broken parts of her life can be fixed. In Jesus we find we can stop hiding from our sin and instead come the to the God who can heal us and that is a great hope for all humans. There is no person that God does not want to help but it is our choice and if we decide to not take up God on His promise we will be destroyed and God hates that so much He would die for us instead. This is the God I want us to learn to trust in and to build a life on.

No one should ever say that they are not broken because it is the greatest lie. It stands in contrast to what is real and what is true. The problem is that to many of us hide behind the idea that we are not broken or at least we are okay. God hates this because it causes us to miss the hope and joy that God has for us. Our God wants to bring healing to us and longs for to find peace in our broken world. When we will not admit we need help and only God has the real help we need it causes us to have a mind set that leads us further away from God and closer to destruction. People that don’t feel secure have a habit of looking down and not seeing the things around them and our verse addressees this issue when we are insecure in our hearts. The verse has God calling us to “look up” and to “look around” with the idea that when we have our heads down we miss what God is doing and what God wants us to see. In this instant God is calling people that are sad and have been beaten to see that things are going to get better. God is calling to all people to stop looking down and believing we are beaten and start looking up because God is at work. Because we are so broken it is hard to look up and trust God but God wants to encourage us and to tell us He is working even when we are broken people. The criminal on the cross that Jesus offers paradise to tells us about the God who wants us to look up and look around. As bad as he was that criminal saw that Jesus was his only hope and even as late as he was seeking God he found God did not let him down. Being broken people should not keep us from God but teach us to trust God because He is the only one who can help us. What is best is that God does not hide His love for us and His desire to fix our damaged lives. Over and over God calls to us to come and find in Him all we really need. We just have to lift our heads and look around and notice what God is doing. A lot of people don’t like God because He has rules and He talks to us about our guilt but that is what I love most. God loves me enough to tell me the truth and then when I face that truth He offers to come and work in my life. What a God we have that works in this way. No one should be afraid to look up and to look around because when we do we will see a God who invites us to come and trust in Him. This is what makes our faith so powerful and so much more then anything else out there.

A great thing about our faith is that it encourages people to look up and to look around and because of that people of faith tend to be more positive and tend to see things in more beautiful tones. Faith in God should help us be people who see the world not just as it is but as God sees it. Just as we see the broken things we should see the beautiful things in the world and the potential of every human just as God does. When we see broken things we should see them as God does because God thinks about fixing broken things. At the cross Jesus gives hope to that criminal and that is just the kind of things God does. I want our faith to make us positive and hopeful people who even when we struggle we see God at work. An advantage of getting older has been that I now know that even in my pain God can work. When we look up and we look around we even see God using those broken things for His glory. The finishing part of this verse is that God speaks about jewels and that only when we look up and look around can we see the jewels that God wants us to see. Only when we are looking up can we see the hope that arises out of God’s promises. I like to think of it as a rainbow because if we want to see the promise that God made we have to look up and when we do we see this beautiful thing that holds God’s promise. Christians should be the most hopeful and positive people because we are called to look up and around and see the wonder of God at work. This means God is working in us and in the world and all we have to do is look because God is there and God is doing amazing things. What hope we have that our God is like He is and what great wonder it is to be people who God calls to be.

It is important that we don’t close this week out without seeing what God is doing here. People are suffering and they are questioning where God is as they struggle. God wants to help them know that He is with them even in the hard time they are facing so He encourages them. Notice that God does not end their struggle but He does say that one day things will be different and if we just look up we can see what God is doing. We have a God who knows that humans suffer but He also wants to give us hope when we are having problems. This positive God makes us want to worship and serve God even more. Pain and suffering are part of the human condition but God offers to deal with that negativity by asking us to trust Him. Building faith in God should be a positive and hopeful thing that gives us strength when things are not what they should be. Our God is a God who wants to pour out blessing and one way to do that is to encourage us to look up to Him and look around at what He is doing.