Sermons

On the road to Golgotha, bearing the cross, Jesus meets women who are beating their breasts and weeping. He tells them not to weep for him, but for themselves and for their children.

“Daughters of Jerusalem” does not mean particular individuals; the phrase stands for the whole people outside the city walls. Just as he said, Jerusalem and its temple later fell in the war with Rome, and the people suffered cruelly. It came to pass exactly as a prophet had foretold long before.

What God does and what people do are aimed at different ends. Those who put Jesus to death thought they had won, yet God gained the victory by giving him up to death. As Jesus came and died according to the prophecies, the promise of his return will also be fulfilled to the letter, and so his people must live by a faith that makes ready for that day.

While Moses is receiving the law on Mount Sinai, the people of Israel make a golden calf and worship it. At Kadesh Barnea, on the edge of Canaan, they have God’s command, yet they follow the human idea of sending spies. When they see the giants, they are afraid and weep all night, saying they should go back to Egypt.

What broke down was their unbelief, not God’s plan. God answered them in the very words of their grumbling and allowed forty years of life in the wilderness. Even in that wilderness he fed and clothed them with manna and water from the rock, and held them close to the end. Making them cross the Red Sea was not meant to punish them either. It was love, meant to baptize them and make them his own people.

When human thinking is mixed in, God’s work fails. Those who lack certainty must fall on their faces and pray, no matter what. For anyone who believes in the cross that the risen Jesus Christ bore in their place, it is only right to live faithfully and not defile that grace.

Moses builds the tabernacle to God’s own design. It was not to be built from a wish for something splendid; it had to be built exactly as God had laid it down. The basin, the altar of burnt offering, the ark of the covenant: God himself had said where each was to stand.

That tabernacle was a shadow, showing Jesus Christ to the people. As he had promised Abraham, Israel came out of slavery, and to that very moment God had led them, waiting until the appointed time was fulfilled. Yet the people set free from bondage complained again and again, and fell in the wilderness. When grace is received and then taken for granted, it bears no fruit.

Moses, too, first tried to rescue his own people in his own strength and made a ruin of it; only after forty years in the wilderness, when he had laid everything down, was he called. For Jesus as well, leaving the throne and coming to this earth was itself suffering. God’s people must not forget that grace, and must stand as those who live out their lives exactly as God has ordained.

As 2021 begins, the sermon looks back on a year in which the epidemic left everyone hemmed in. It was God who sent the calamity and God who lifted it, and so this season must be endured in repentance.

Faith comes by hearing. In Old Testament times God’s people could not hold the Scriptures in their hands, so they listened again and again, learned the words by heart and engraved them within; and through a father’s voice passing the word on to his children, the household was made firm in God. Today the Bible lies within arm’s reach, yet if faith does not grow, it is because the word has been heard but never written on the tablet of the heart.

Having passed through a time when the congregation could not freely come to church, Christians need to consider afresh how urgently they must hear the word and commit it to memory. Those who live out a faith that prays all day long, like those who once recited the word under their breath from morning till night, can hold fast to their faith and protect their families, however the world may turn.

In a season when COVID had closed the doors to gathered worship, Christmas raised the question once more: why did Jesus come into this world? The usual answer is simply that he came to atone for sin, yet the sermon turned to the word that no one has ever seen God, and that the one who is at the Father’s side has made him known.

The purpose of the incarnation reaches beyond the forgiveness of sins; it lies in the revelation of God himself. Eternal life, Jesus said, is to know God and the one whom he has sent. His divinity, his person and character, and the whole of his ministry, in which he broke the power of the devil and established the Kingdom of God, were presented as a revelation of who God is.

The message went on to describe the church as the bride and the body of Jesus, his family and his temple. It closed with an exhortation: rather than resting in the fact of their salvation, Christians must seek to discern how God desires to reveal Jesus Christ through their lives.

Paul had once persecuted Christ, but after meeting him he preached the gospel to his very last moment. Sickness gave way at his touch, and those who heard the word repented and were born again.

The reason Paul did not forget grace lies in how he regarded the past. The Jewish people think of the past as lying before them, and so they live always facing the grace that has gone before. That is why, even when God did not answer his prayer for healing, Paul came to understand that the weaker he was, the more Christ’s power was made perfect.

Standing in chains before a king of this world, Paul was not afraid and proclaimed the gospel. Even now, as the church strips away words like the cross and repentance in order to become more like the world, what God desires is for each one of his people not to let their lamp go out in the place where they stand.

A young man listening to the word in an upper room sat by the window, sank into sleep in the night, and dropped from the third story. He seemed already dead, yet as day broke he was alive again. Saul, meanwhile, on his way to Damascus to seize Christians, fell to the ground before a light and a voice from heaven; he was struck blind, and there he met Jesus.

Only someone with eyes given by God can say that there is life in a person who looks dead. That God should call Saul, who had brought about Stephen’s death, and even see to it that he was healed is beyond human understanding, yet salvation rests wholly in the sovereignty of God. Before Christ, Saul came to count as rubbish the world and the power of the law he had once clung to.

Christians are not to pronounce the people of the world dead; they must leave them in God’s hands and preach the gospel. Like Ananias, they need an obedience that goes when the word says go and stands still when it says stand, even when they do not understand. When, before the knowledge of Christ, they lay down what the world counted as strength, they can live out a faith that runs to the finish, as the apostle Paul did.

At the Feast of Firstfruits, the first offering is made from the earliest barley to ripen on the plain of Gennesaret. Seven Sabbaths are counted from Firstfruits, and on the fiftieth day comes Pentecost, when the offering is made from the ripened wheat. Through the forty-nine days in between, the people of Israel had to count each day, longing for God to send the northwest and southeast winds.

Barley ripens only when the cold northwest wind blows, and wheat and fruit only when the hot southeast wind comes. The one who rules over that wind and rain is the Lord alone, so counting the days was itself a confession that they would rely on God and no other. Yet the people of Israel rejected God, asking for a human king like the nations around them. Just as Samuel had warned, thunder and rain fell in the very last week of the wheat harvest, a judgment that ruined the whole year’s crop.

Thanks must be given now, while blessings are enjoyed in abundance; it is folly to realize only after they are taken away that they were God’s grace all along. Jesus, too, rose from the dead on this Feast of Firstfruits and became the firstfruits. In the place God has given them, his people must bring their offerings with a willing heart and live without forgetting his grace.

Commanded to proclaim judgment on Nineveh, Jonah fled to Tarshish instead. Only after he had been caught in a storm, thrown into the sea and kept three days in the belly of a great fish did he go to Nineveh and preach the word, and the king and his people repented.

Jonah did not run away merely because he feared what might befall him for proclaiming judgment. He was unwilling to go because he already knew that God would spare the city even without him. When Nineveh repented, Jonah grew angry with God instead, and through a vine that withered within a day, God showed him that he cared more for his own comfort than for the lives of a hundred and twenty thousand people.

When God sent Jonah to save Nineveh, it was not a command but love. God longs to give life to the world even when it sins, and to understand that heart and proclaim the gospel is the calling given to God’s people.

The Red Sea lies before the Israelites, and the Egyptian army is behind them. The people grumble against Moses and cry out that they would rather go back to Egypt.

Moses gives no command to fight, nor does he tell them to flee. Instead he urges them not to be afraid, but to stand still and see the salvation God will bring about. To stand still here means to do nothing and to acknowledge the power of God.

The grace received until now was not won by anything we did either; God gave it freely, of his own accord. When we close the mouths that once complained, stand still and acknowledge the power of God, it is through that faith that we come to see miracles.

After the temple and the walls of Jerusalem had fallen into ruin, Nehemiah came as governor and, dividing the work among the people, rebuilt the wall in fifty-two days. When opponents gathered to hinder them, he had the people work with swords and spears in hand.

The wall is not merely a wall; it is a hedge that guards the temple, that is, God’s people. Even after the temple had been regained, there was no wall, so foreigners came and went and the sacrifices became an empty formality. In the same way, without the walls of the Word, prayer and holy living, the greed and lusts of the world come straight in.

Each of God’s people is a temple of God, and so each must build for themselves the wall that guards that temple. Just as Nehemiah held his post and served the people, those who live as dead to the world and raise the wall high through the Word and prayer are able to hold to a faith that does not waver.

Riding on a donkey’s colt, Jesus enters Jerusalem. The crowd waved palm branches, spread their cloaks on the road and cried out “Hosanna”, and the disciples were swept up in the excitement along with them.

Yet this acclaim was not for a Messiah who would save them from sin. It was for a mighty king who would set them free from Rome. The same crowd would later shout for Jesus to be put to death, and only after his eyes met those of Jesus did Peter see that he had denied him three times. Praise raised in hope of the things of this world turns to betrayal once circumstances change.

Jesus knew that such people would betray him, and still he chose to take up the cross for their sake. The apostle Paul, aware that he was the worst of sinners, lived a life of dying daily. To lay aside worldly desire and human righteousness and to follow Jesus in honest faith: this is the decision asked of God’s people today.