Sunday Sermon

 

A Work of God

Isaiah 60:21

All of your people will do what is right. They will receive the earth forever. They are the plant I have planted, the work of my own hands to show my greatness.

Few years ago I was having a conversation with a friend about technology and we began to talk about what people from the past would think about all the things we use every day. My friend believed that people from the past would think some of the things we use are magic but I disagreed. As a historian I am familiar with the level of technical knowledge and general understanding of mechanical skill that existed in history. Some people would be amazed but most people would see a car or a plane or anything mechanical and know the basic ideas behind it. A person from the past might be surprised by the materials used or the tools that it takes to make things but there are people in every age that would grasp what was going on. The reason I talk about this is two fold. First is a deep realization that humans are by nature creative and ingenuitive. This reflects the God who made us in His image. God is creative and builds things that are complex so why should we humans be any different. It does not make us gods but it should help us think about who God is. The second point I want us to consider is that the human condition has not changed. Humans are not smarter then our forbears we just enjoy the cumulated knowledge of the generations that have gone before us. We stand on a hill that is built by all the smart people of the past. I have spoken of this in the past but I want to cover it again here. Humans today are not better then humans in the past and unlike technology the human heart cannot be made better over the course of time. Each human heart of this generation is as broken as previous generations. The same questions and issues that were faced by Adam and Eve are still the questions we have today. Cain kills his brother because he is jealous of the favor that his brother had. People are still killing people for the same reasons. If I were not a man of faith I would despair in this fact but we have a God who knows the human condition and who knows how to fix it. We have a God who gets what is wrong with us and He pours out wisdom to fix the things that are wrong with us. It may be tragic that humans have not changed but it is a joy that we have a God who has not changed either. God knows what is wrong with us and so offers tools and systems to repair and restore us to the way God made us. We have such hope in this God who would choose to die to make us right. Learning to trust that God is not easy because our hearts are so badly damaged by our sin. But we can find hope in God because God is not confused by our situation and God has a plan to help us. It will however take being willing to submit to God’s authority. The good news is that God is really good at teaching us and God knows our deepest needs so He is the best place to go to find the answers we need for our lives.

One of the strongest arguments for the existence of God is creation itself. The specific term that is used is “Fine Tuning” and it is that idea that the universe is so precisely built that to have the universe occur randomly is just not actually possible. Scientists have measured gravity and have found that if the power of gravity was changed by just one ten thousands of a point the universe would not exist. So many scientific facts pile up to make it impossible to ignore that there has to be a designer of creation. Here is where things get a little hard. To imagine a creator of the universe means we have to accept that there is something outside of the time and space we live in. This idea means we have to deal with something that does not seem to make rational sense. A real reason some people have a problem the Big Bang is that it means there was some kind consciousness that made everything and that would mean that we would have to be accountable to that consciousness. For those who believe in the living God that is exactly what we deal with. This issue is both irrational and rational. To believe in a God whom we cannot see and we have no control over seems crazy. At the same time to see how perfect the universe is made and to understand that someone made that universe is very rational. Thinking about this may not feel very helpful but we need to be clear about that God we worship and serve. Grappling with the idea that we believe in the supernatural for rational and intelligent reason is part of taking the next step in our faith and trusting the God we find in His creation. I want us to know who our God is and how our God works and learning about God’s creation points us to the deeper and more powerful parts of what our faith is all about.

My wife bought a fly trap plant this week and it has been the talk of the house. No one is better with plants then Debbie. Over the more then forty years I have known my wife she has worked with thousands of plants. This fly trap looked sad and clearly needed help and so it was brought home. Debbie replanted the fly trap with better soil and we even have it under the grow lamp to help it recover. With her hands my wife is working at bringing to life another plant and it makes me think of our verse we are thinking through. There is so much in this verse that speaks to the God we worship and I want us to get to know that God. As you can probably guess I want to start in the middle of the verse because every thing else hangs on that middle idea. Knowing that God is the source of life is at the center of our faith but that idea is hard to understand and God gets that. So God uses a concept we all have a basic idea of. When we purchased our land one of the things we spent money on was planting grass. Instead of living with the weeds that grew up we wanted a nice looking space so we took the time and effort to plant grass. Over the years that grass has grown and we have a great yard for the grand kids to play in. The idea that God is using, is that He choose to plant life and He choose to have it grow. Life is not some incidental event but a planned thing that God thought about. If you will excuse me we need to plant that idea deep in our beings and work to make it grow because it is at the center of our faith. Now this phrase alludes to something more because God is talking to the Israelite nation. What we get from what God is saying is that God has a plan and He is carrying it out. We have a God who is at work and who builds things and we need to know this because it will effect how we see God, Jesus, the cross and the resurrection. Knowing that God is at work will also have an immediate result in our lives because we will find hope when things are not going like we want. God plants things because He thinks in terms of growth and development. Just like plants we will go through seasons of hardship and struggle and if we don’t hold on to this idea that God is at work we can sometimes find ourselves lost. Trusting a God we cannot see and knowing that He is out there working is hard but we can find strength when we believe that God is at work at all times.

Often when people think of God they think of this God high up in heaven that does not know the suffering or pain of human life. Because we cannot see God, this is a very common feeling and we find it in the book of Job. Our verse though tells us something very different. We have a God who is very connected to what is going on in the world. The verse says that God did things with His own hands and I like that concept. The things I build with my own hands have a lot greater meaning to me then when I just get something from the store. God is so personal in this verse and that is a concept we need to think through. The person we find in Jesus gives us another point to see what I mean. Over and over Jesus interacts with people on a very personal level. We find Jesus talking with people and learning their stories. This reflects how God works. Scripture makes it clear that God knows us very well and cares about us. The idea that God uses his hands to plant tells us how deeply God gets involved and that God knows what is going on in our lives. It needs to be noticed that the result of God working is that God’s glory shines out. God does not do what He does for glory but God’s greatness comes out by what God does. We worship God not because He saves us but we know the greatness of God because God wants to save us. Knowing that God is at work in our lives with His own hands should help us develop the faith God wants us to have in our lives. Faith is about trusting that God can do what He says He will do and thinking about God working in our lives with His hands makes our faith so much more real. Now we move to the first part of this verse where we find people doing the right. Doing the right thing is a result of knowing the God is at work in our lives. God has His hand on our lives and so we seek to grow and become the thing God has planted. Working with God to grow and become the people God wants us to be shows we have learned we can trust God and we can know that God is in control. Let God’s hands work to shape us because when we do our lives will be better and the world will be better. We have a loving God whose hands plant life and we should rejoice in that.

Believing in the greatness of God is not an easy thing so God has worked hard to help us trust in Him. When we learn to live by God’s ideas we are learning about the greatness of God. The hope we have in Jesus is because we have a great God who personally gets involved in each of our lives. We are not some number that God looks down on and judges us by but we are planted by God’s hands to do His work and to show God’s glory. It is hard to trust God and we struggle to be the people God wants us to be. Working at knowing how great God is will help us live as God calls us to. God wants to give us all of the world because we are so important to God and all we have to do is know God is in control and begin to live by his ideas. There is so much wonder in the glory to God that it will light up our lives and we will radiate and shine because God is at work in us.