Message by Pastor John Culp : September 28, 2008
“It’s Your Call – Part 3”
Text – 2 Chronicles 36:22-23
I sprained an ankle back in early July. That, of course, is a common injury. You may well have sprained an ankle or two yourself over the years. I know I had! But this was easily the worst I’d ever suffered.
Now I hesitate to even use the word ‘suffer’ here! The sprain certainly did bring a bit of pain, as well as a lot of discomfort and inconvenience. But of course it was nothing life-threatening. On the positive side, I did discover that having a sprained ankle is not all bad! Take, for example, the area of yard work.
It is certainly not true that having a gimpy leg affords any advantage when it comes to pushing a lawn mower around the yard. But that’s precisely the point! It didn’t take me too long to figure out that a sprained ankle is a perfect excuse – er, I mean, a perfectly valid reason for not mowing the lawn.
The fact of the matter is that I sprained my ankle on July 9. In subsequent weeks, stubborn pride led me to decline repeated offers from my good neighbor Will Slusher to cut the grass for me. When I finally did mow the front lawn this week, I didn’t quite have to use a machete. But it was close!
Here’s the key question – and the reason I tell you this whole sorry story: How valid was it for me to refrain from cutting the grass because of my injury? On July 15: absolutely so! On August 15? I’m not so sure. By September 15? Not much at all!
It’s all a matter of motivation: Why do we do certain things, and not do others? The reality, as you well know, is often very complicated. Take even this simple example: Why did you come to church this morning? The fact is that there’s a wide range of possible answers to that modest question. It could be out of habit: ‘It’s what I always do.’ It could be because I’m paid to be here. Or you may answer that your parents made you come, or that if you don’t go to worship, you’ll feel guilty. How about this response: I came today because I expect to encounter here, in a special way, the Lord of the Universe, and I want to assemble with His people to sing His praises. There could of course be a host of other answers. In fact there are likely several reasons for most of us – some obviously better than others!
It’s very helpful for us to consider the whole matter of motivation today – especially why we don’t do certain things – in the context of the mission and ministry of the church.
You may know that we’ve been concentrating on that crucial topic for the last few weeks, all leading up to today’s Mission/Ministry Fair here at Tower Church. The angle from which I’d like us to view all this today is why we get involved – and just as important, why we often don’t get involved in the work of the church.
Such considerations lead us to the story of ancient Israel, and specifically to the dramatic proclamation of Cyrus in 538 B.C., which we just read together God has a crucial lesson for us in it:
No matter how strong our reasons for not serving may appear to be,
God calls every believer into active service in Christ’s kingdom.
Let’s see what our good God wants to teach us today from that official action taken by an oriental monarch twenty-five centuries ago, half a world away!
It’s helpful for us to begin by trying to really understand the situation that confronted God’s people in the story before us. Suffice to say that these were tumultuous times in Israel’s history!
None of this had come about overnight. For generations the people had strayed from faithful obedience to the Lord who had first called their Father Abraham centuries earlier, the One who had created them as a nation in the Exodus from Egyptian slavery. In response to their sin, God had sent one prophet after another to them, to call them back to obedience. But the people had ultimately ignored that message.
Over a number of generations, God sent His divine judgment in His rebellious people. After the glory days of the united kingdom – eighty years total of the reigns of King David and his son Solomon – a great division tore the nation apart. Only the southern kingdom of Judah (which included the tribe of Benjamin) continued to have a ruler in the line of David to sit on the throne in Jerusalem. The northern kingdom, with its capital in Samaria, groaned under one bad king after another. It was finally conquered by the Assyrians in 722 B.C.
Judah survived much longer – though it too was under pressure from neighboring peoples. After a series of prophets in vain called the nation to repentance, Judah was finally overcome by the Babylonian Empire about a century and a half later, in 586 B.C.
Now it’s really very difficult for us to relate to their experience in all this. I would not for even a minute want to minimize the gravity of the current financial crisis our nation faces. But there’s really no comparison between our situation right now and the national trauma they experienced. To try to help us appreciate the way the faithful remnant would have felt in those days, let me ask you to use your imagination just a bit.
Imagine that on September 11, 2001, the people who hate our nation did not merely fly hijacked airplanes into buildings. Suppose instead they had managed to set off ten or twenty nuclear weapons in major American cities, so that that day New York, Washington, Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, Los Angeles and a dozen other major cities were obliterated. Imagine further that in the mass chaos and confusion that followed, they had staged an organized land invasion here on U.S. soil – an invasion that succeeded, so that in a matter of weeks, the government of the United States (what was left of it) had been forced to surrender to our enemies. Islamic law had been quickly imposed on the whole nation. All official business was now conducted in Arabic. We and other Christian churches were allowed to continue to operate, but only under tight restrictions. To do anything that could be construed as reaching out to share our faith in Christ, to make converts, would be punishable by imprisonment or worse.
For those of us who love this nation, it’s painful to even imagine such a scenario. But those who managed to survive the conquest of Judah didn’t merely imagine a national disaster on a scale like that. For two generations they lived out that nightmare in painful exile to Babylon.
If any people could be expected to have completely given up hope – to have their national spirit totally crushed – it was God’s people Israel at the time of the exile. If any people would seem to have had a perfect excuse for not heeding any call to service, it was the Jewish community living in the Persian Empire at the time of the great decree of Cyrus.
Yet it was to that very people – people who had gone through exactly that sort of national horror – that God issued His stirring call to rise up and do something great for His kingdom!
If you want to see what happens next in the history of God’s people, read the two short books that come directly after Chronicles in our Bible. Ezra and Nehemiah record the return of the remnant to Jerusalem, and tell of the great struggles through which they go as they do finally repair the broken down wall of Jerusalem and rebuild and dedicate a new Temple in the holy city.
Now why were they able to do that? Two reasons: First, the scope of the mission God had for them was so great that it dwarfed all reasons they had for giving in to despair. The Lord had kingdom work for them to do in rebuilding His holy Temple.
And second, God was with them. That fact is not explicit in the text we read; it appears there only as the expressed wish of Cyrus in issuing his great proclamation. He says of those returning to Jerusalem: “May the LORD…God be with [them” (2 Chronicles 36:23 NKJV).
But that wish clearly came to fruition. The people faced stiff opposition from their enemies as they labored to rebuild Jerusalem’s wall. Nehemiah gave orders for each worker to carry a sword at job site, and the crews took turns working and standing guard. Nehemiah had this word of encouragement to the teams: “Our God will fight for us” (Nehemiah 4:20).
Now how does all this relate specifically to us?
I want to say at the outset that you really do have good reasons not to serve, not to do one thing more for the kingdom of God than you’re doing right now. Please believe me: I intend no hint of sarcasm here!
This lawyer and an engineer are fishing in the Caribbean. The lawyer says, “I’m here because my house burned down, and everything I owned was destroyed by the fire. The insurance company paid for everything.”
“That’s really a coincidence,” the engineer says. “I’m here because my house and all my belongings were destroyed by a flood, and my insurance company also paid for everything.”
The lawyer looks at him, somewhat confused. He says, “How do you start a flood?”
(www.jokesplace.com)
You’re not necessarily playing the role of the crooked lawyer if you tell yourself you have good reasons not to do more for Christ and His kingdom. Obviously I don’t have to tell you some of the reasons you might have. As we mentioned in our Prayer of Confession today, you might protest that you’re too old, or too young. You might argue that you don’t have any talents or skills that are really needed. You may say that your health is too bad. Then there’s always the good old standby: You’re too busy. Time is just too tight for you to give more; and of course that one also works well when it comes to the prospect of giving more of ‘your’ money to God.
How valid are any reasons you might give? You would know better than I. And of course God knows! Some might be every bit as justifiable as my not cutting the grass the week after I sprained my ankle. Others might be more akin to my using the same line of reasoning in mid-September – or anywhere along a scale between the two.
But whatever reasons you might give for not doing more in the mission and ministry of the church, the same principles apply for us as for Israel in exile: God gives two compelling reasons why you can and should do more – reasons that trump any arguments you might put forward – whether they’re perfectly valid, or just excuses.
First: God has kingdom work for each of us to do. For His people of long ago, that work was rebuilding the wall of Jerusalem, and His holy Temple. For us it might be teaching Sunday School, or taking a short-term mission trip, or becoming involved in the prayer ministry of the church. It might involve working with our deacons, or anything else that could be described as rebuilding Christ’s church in this place (and of course I’m not necessarily talking here about rebuilding a church of brick, stone and glass).
The mere fact of the eternal scope and importance of the work to which God calls each of us overrides any reasons we can possibly give not to do that work. Just think of the significance of that work to which Jesus calls each one of us! The great Swiss reformer Ulrich Zwingli put it this way: “You are a tool in the hands of God. He demands your service, not your rest. Yet, how fortunate you are that He lets you take part in His work.” (in “Zwingli: Father of the Swiss Reformation,” Christian History, no. 4.)
So first, we can’t possibly make excuses when God has kingdom work for us to do!
And then second (just as with the people who returned from exile), He promises to be with us – with us to guide us into His will; with us to equip us for service; with us to sustain us through hardship. I don’t have to tell you that any time you do put your hand to the work of the kingdom, you can be assured that hard times will come!
But that of course is no reason to turn back. In today’s New Testament lesson, Saint Paul writes to the Romans: “We…rejoice in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope. And hope does not disappoint us, because God has poured out His love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, whom He has given us” (Romans 5:3-5 NIV).
You do have good reasons not to attempt one more thing than you’re already doing. But the reasons on the other side are even better!
Let me mention just two specifics. First, we mentioned in our announcements today the work Presbyterian Disaster Assistance is doing to help those devastated by Hurricane Ike. Contribute to that effort, however you might be able.
But whether you do that or not, by all means, take part in our Mission/Ministry Fair today. Make the commitment to spend at least a moment at each station of the fair. As you do, ask God to speak to your heart, and be open to anything the Spirit might whisper in your ear.
I urge you; I challenge you: make a commitment today to at least one mission or ministry opportunity that you’re not doing already. And don’t ever listen to the voice of the enemy, who’s always happy to tell you that the needs are too great, and your own ability to contribute to the kingdom too small. Croft Pentz wisely puts it this way: “A dewdrop does God’s will as much as a thunderstorm.”
(Croft M. Pentz, The Complete Book of Zingers [Wheaton: Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., 1990.])
It’s only been in relatively recent years have that the Masai people of Kenya have received the Gospel. One of their number is a man named Kimiti Ole Rerente. Though he has never been to school, he has memorized great portions of Scripture. He preaches in villages all around him. He teaches children. He assists the missionaries who serve among his people. He has won his entire family to Christ.
Kimiti has found the Good News of Jesus Christ far too good to keep. Oh, and one thing more about him. He is blind!
(Robert C. Shannon, 1000 Windows, [Cincinnati, Ohio: Standard Publishing Company, 1997])
A man living in Kenya who is not only uneducated, but also forced to live out all his days in darkness, might seem to have every good reason to keep silent about his faith. But the light of the Gospel is all the light Kimiti needs. He knows – just as did the faithful who returned from exile in Babylon – that the kingdom work God has for him is far too vital to be derailed for any reasons – good, bad or otherwise. He knows – just as did those who rebuilt the Temple in Jerusalem – that God has promised to be with him.
Do you know the same?
Let us pray. Heavenly Father, thank You for entrusting Your own kingdom work to us! Please forgive us when we make excuses for not doing more! Help us to remember all You have done for us in Your precious Son, and responding to that amazing blessing, answering Your call on our lives, help us to step forward to go where You want us to go and do what You want us to do, clinging day by day to Your promise to be with us always. We pray in the strong name of Jesus. Amen.