Our Beliefs : Sermons : Sermon Archive - 2007 : July 22, 2007

Theme: God's Word Works Wonders

Church year occasion: Pentecost 8

The Internet is really an amazing thing. With the touch of a button, we can be connected to as much information as we could ever want, with more being added every second. If you forget the words to the National Anthem, you can use a search engine and find it. If you need a special recipe because guests are coming over, it's at your fingertips. If you want to find out why it's impossible to escape from a Black Hole in outer space, you can find that, too. In the information age we live in, information is everything, and that information is only moments away from your computer screen, or now your cell phone screen.

But how do we use that information? You can find out on the Internet that skunks are best known for their ability to excrete a strong foul-smelling odor, or ask your parents, who are walking encyclopedias of knowledge, but if that doesn't translate into you keeping away from skunks when you run into one, that knowledge was wasted.

It's the same with our relationship to God. God tells us today that it's not difficult to find out who God is and what he's done for us and what he expects of us, but the problem comes in putting that knowledge into practice in our lives. It all comes down to the Word of God that is at our fingertips everyday. Are we using God's Word though? Are we putting it into practice? Moses tells us today that God's Word Works Wonders.

Our reading describes a time in Israel's history when they had just experienced 40 years of frustration. They were sitting at the northern border of Egypt just about ready to enter Canaan, the Promised Land, a land unimaginably rich, fertile and productive. Recall that it had taken them 40 years to cover a distance which normally would require no longer than 4 months. Remember why? The great God and mighty Lord had delivered them from the hateful hands of the Egyptians who had mistreated and abused them for hundreds of years. They begged God to save them. God said, "Follow me." With God's man, Moses, in the lead, they walked right across the bottom of the Red Sea whose waters God had separated to produce a safe passage. God destroyed and drowned the entire Egyptian army who tried to follow them. To provide for them in the vast wilderness, God had water flowing from rocks, a bread-like substance called manna growing from the ground every morning and delicious quail falling from the sky every night. God was saying, "I am with you. Conquer the land of Canaan. Don't be afraid." But the spies sent to scout the land of promise returned and said, "No way. The land is great, productive, and beautiful. But the people...they're huge. There's too many of them. We'd be toast if we tried to fight them." To show his displeasure at their lack of trust, God delayed their arrival in the Promised Land for 40 years until all the doubters 20 years old and older had died.

Our reading from Deuteronomy comes at the end of those 40 years. A new generation was ready to enter the Promised Land. Moses encouraged them, "Trust God; believe God; follow God's Word and decrees and you will be blessed beyond belief...with food and flocks as well as divine favor and forgiveness. In other words, you'll be blessed physically and spiritually, in every aspect of life." Look at verses 9-10: "The LORD your God will make you most prosperous in all the work of your hands and in the fruit of your womb, the young of your livestock and the crops of your land. The LORD will again delight in you and make you prosperous, just as he delighted in your fathers, if you obey the LORD your God and keep his commands and decrees that are written in this Book of the Law and turn to the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul."

The fathers Moses was referring to were Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Judah. These people were not perfect. But they did acknowledge their imperfections, trusted God's promise of forgiveness and then fought their sinful inclinations and temptations and attempted to lead lives of obedience to God's guiding Word, because they loved and trusted God who gave it.

If you are looking for some parallel with the present -- and I hope you are -- there's not a one of us in here or out there who is perfect either. Speaking for the entire human race, David says, "Surely, I was sinful at birth, sinful from the time my mother conceived me." He wasn't saying, "Yeah, I had this problem with God when I was born, but I got over it," like a case of colic or jaundice. The sin problem inherent in the human heart is deadly, damning, terminal, permanent and humanly incurable. Note that I said, humanly incurable. Again, God tells us in his Word, "with God nothing is impossible."

As great as the information superhighway is in finding out almost everything you'd ever want to know, the most important knowledge is found where generation after generation has found it -- in the Bible. The Bible tells us that Jesus is God's response to man's sin problem. Jesus is God, but God became a man to save us. Jesus' perfect, sinless life was God's replacement for our daily, damning sinful lives. Jesus' death on the cross was God's final touch to his plan to punish the sins of all by focusing his wrath on one person, Jesus, our Substitute and Savior. Because of that, God declared us forgiven. It's all due to God's grace, his undeserved love.

A Christian counselor was troubled by this line in her church's statement of faith: We deserve God's condemnation. She said she often talked with clients who were so beaten down with self-condemnation that they needed to hear, You deserve God's love. I admire her for her sympathy and empathy, but she's wrong. Her thinking is flawed. It doesn't agree with God's official Word. The good news of the gospel is not that we deserve God's love. The good news is that God sees us in all our sin and unworthiness and inability, yet he loves us so much that he has provided for our complete forgiveness and acceptance. God reaches out and touches people with that message. In so doing he transforms them. When others are reveling in sin, the transformed are regretting their sin. When others are pooh-poohing sin in general, the transformed are pondering their sin and their deserved punishment. When others are loaded with guilt produced by a living conscience, the transformed are living in peace at God's promise of forgiveness through Christ. When others are inventing new and different perversions, the transformed are more interested in following God's holy guidelines to be more like Jesus. God's Word does work wonders. It transforms condemned and uncaring people into conscientious and caring people of God.

So how can we get that Word of God that changes us so completely? Do we have to go to the ends of the earth or even into the far reaches of space on our quest to find it? Not at all. Moses says, "Now what I am commanding you today is not too difficult for you or beyond your reach. It is not up in heaven, so that you have to ask, 'Who will ascend into heaven to get it and proclaim it to us so we may obey it?' Nor is it beyond the sea, so that you have to ask, 'Who will cross the sea to get it and proclaim it to us so we may obey it?' No, the word is very near you; it is in your mouth and in your heart so you may obey it."

In other words, not only did God do the amazing thing of saving us from our own well-deserved damnation; he also made sure we know about what he's done for us and continues to do for us. He gave us his Word of life so readily available that the average household has several Bibles in their house, and now a Bible only as far away as your computer or cell phone. The question is: Will we use it? Will we read it? So often people say they are looking for fulfillment in their lives. They are in a rut and can't get out. They need something, but they don't know what it is. That something is God's Word. But are they willing to read it and let God speak to them. Are you? Am I?

More often than not, the biggest hindrance to establishing intimate time with God is our own built-in reluctance and aversion to spending time with God in Bible reading. What do we do? Confess our failure to make time for God. Then recognize that spending time with God in Bible reading is vital, essential for our spiritual lives, just as vital as making sure we get enough to eat each day. Then develop a plan as to when it's going to happen. One man followed a plan which he nicknamed HWLW -- His Word the Last Word. Every night just before turning out the light, he reads several verses from the Bible or meditates on a verse he has memorized. Before he goes to sleep he wants the last word he thinks about to be from God...not Dan Rather or Peter Jennings, or Dave Letterman or Jay Leno, or even Newsweek, but from God.

For those who don't make time to read God's Word, please know what you are missing and the danger to which you are exposing yourself. To those of you who do, you will never really appreciate all the good it's doing until heaven. Because God's Word works wonders. God makes that promise. Now will we take him up on it? Do you want to transform your life? Read, study, learn, and believe God's Word, and then get ready for a changed heart and life. Amen.