Clayton Presbyterian Church
November 26, 2006
From Bad to Worse
We are in the second week of our sermon series, where we are looking at the promises of God. As we said last week, throughout the history of God’s people, whenever they were stuck, in the dark, having really screwed up and being without hope, God would give them a promise. What I hope becomes clear to all of us as we continue week after week up until Christmas, is that making promises is central to who God is. He is a promise-making God. If we want to understand God, then we need to be familiar with his promises. He makes the promises and he always keeps them. We need to know God’s promises, first because it is the way that we know God better, and second, because God gives us his promises to lead us to him. This is what we are looking at today.
When we last left the hero of our story, the creatures which he had created rebelled against him. They had forsaken his word and guidance for their lives. They thought, this man and woman, this Adam and Eve, that they knew what was best for their lives. But the choice that they made led them from fellowship with God to alienation and isolation. They couldn’t have been more wrong. They were doomed to lead of life of their own making, a cursed life. But, in the middle of the curses that God said over them, there was a promise.
After they were removed from God’s presence, things went from bad to worse. They had stepped on the slippery slope. Their original sin escalated to murder. Pride went unchecked. Sin and evil multiplied on the earth until, as it says a few chapters later, God regretted having created these humans. With the tower of Babel, the entire civilization was aiming to be like God. There were not content to be creatures. They wanted to be the creator. It looks like there is going to be no end to the evil. It looks like there is no hope in sight.
But if you know God, then you know that this is exactly when God does the unexpected and spreads light and hope and truth, and this is what he does. He does so though a man named Abram, who eventually gets the name, Abraham. Listen to the beginning of his story.
Scripture Reading #1: Genesis 12:1-3
1 Now the Lord said to Abram, "Go from your country and your kindred and your father's house to the land that I will show you. 2 I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. 3 I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed." (NRSV)
God’s answer to the sin of humanity has got to be the most improbable, and by human standards, the most stupid. He chooses one ordinary man through whom to bring his salvation. Before this, the only thing we know about Abram is that his is one name in a list of names in a genealogy. That’s it, a name. He is not rich. He is not powerful. He is not attractive. He isn’t well-spoken. He doesn’t have any advanced degrees. None of the things that would make someone influential mark this man.
What sets him apart is that God has made promises to him. In others, God doesn’t choose him because he is special. He is special because God chooses him. God chooses him and makes promises to him, three promises to be exact.
First, God promises to take him to a special land. Second, God promises to make his decedents numerous, to make from him a great people. Third, God promises to bless him so that he may be a blessing. How big of a blessing? A big one, such that “in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” God has huge things in mind for this people. So the promise is threefold: land, a great nation, and a blessing. The rest of the Bible can be read as a fulfillment of these promises. They are fully and finally realized in Jesus Christ.
Making Promises
Before we go on with this story, I want to pause and think about this aspect of God being a promise-maker. God gives us his word on something, and then he will keep it—no matter what. Every promise is an iron-clad promise.
When was the last time that you made someone a promise? Did you promise your boss that you would get a project done? Did you promise your kids that you would take them somewhere? Maybe you promised a friend that you would call or write? Or, promised you spouse you would get some unpleasant task done? Did you keep your promise?
Promises are one of the most important parts of relationships because they have to do with trust, and where there is no trust there is no relationship. Promises are the foundation of a relationship.
Recently, I did some premarital counseling for a couple that is getting married at a Presbyterian church up in Michigan. And one of the things that I try to impress on couples who are about to get married is that the thing the are doing, more than anything else, is making a promise to one another. A wedding is not first and foremost a celebration, although it surely should be that. First and foremost it is a way of making a very serious promise. We used to use the word, “solemnize,” that is, to make solumn and serious.
Why do I make such a big deal about this? Because the culture out there just doesn’t get it. Consider what actor Johnny Depp has said about marriage, which I think is pretty typical.
“Marriage can be whatever you define it as. For example, I don't feel like I need a piece of paper that says I own her and she owns me. I think signing a piece of paper doesn't mean anything in the eyes of God or in the eyes of people. The thing is, if you are together and you love each other and are good to each other, make babies and all that, for all intents and purposes you are married.”
For Depp, and countless others, marriage is two people who have strong feelings for one another, do nice things for one another, possibly undertake some big ventures together, like having kids. If you do these things, then you are married. And he is quite clear that it has nothing to do with a paper or promises.
The problem with defining marriage with strong feelings is that feelings fade. And if we look around we see countless divorces because people “feel out of love.” Their relationships have no foundation, so when they hit bad whether it all collapses. We all have this idealized version of our relationships and none of them will measure up.
Migraine Marriage
Kari and mine’s relationship is no different. There is probably no more idealized event in the relationship than the wedding day. And our wedding day was pretty perfect. The weather was great. All of our friends and family came together. There were no major problems with the dress or invitations or anything like that. But one thing didn’t go as planned; Kari had a migraine. She was laying down in the dark before the ceremony. It was so bad that she got sick in the bathroom right before the processional. She made it through the ceremony, but then had to excuse herself during the pictures to get sick again. She spent almost the whole of the reception laying down upstairs in a coat closet inside of enjoying the time with friends and family. Later, on the first night of our married life, we were in the emergency room where she was getting a shot of painkiller from this nurse who looked like he just got off of his Harley-Davidson.
This was not quite what we had planned. Life never turns out the way that we plan. If you talk to a couple that is celebrating a 50-year Wedding Anniversary, almost without an exception they can tell you of a time when they were about to throw in the towel and give up. Marriage is hard. But what gets them through it is the fact that they made a promise. It is the keeping of promises that makes long-term relationships possible. It is promises that let you know that you can depend on the other person when the going gets tough. It is the promise that keeps you from all of the doubt that comes from wondering if the other person is going to leave. It is a promise that creates a sense of safety and security.
But promises-makers and promise-keepers are getting harder to come by. Writer and speaker Lewis Smedes says:
Yes, somewhere people still make and keep promises. They choose not to quit when the going gets rough because they promised once to see it through. They stick to lost causes. They hold on to a love grown cold. They stay with people who have become pains in the neck. They still dare to make promises and care enough to keep the promises they make. I want to say to you that if you have a ship you will not desert, if you have people you will not forsake, if you have causes you will not abandon, then you are like God.
If you are a keeper of your promises you are more like God. God is a promise-keeper and so we too should be promise-keepers. We need to be people who do what we say. We need to be true to our word.
Trusting the Promises
Abram was made three promises by God. Abram accepted these promises. He trusted God. He left the land of his birthplace and of this fathers and set out the some far off land, trusting that God would show him. But, then he had begun to have second thoughts. God had promised him thousands of descendents. There was only one problem. Abram and his wife Sarai had no children. Two problems, actually. Not only did they have no kids, but they were old. They were well beyond childbearing age. In fact, Abram and Sarai had such doubt that Sarai gave a servant of hers to bear a child for her. Were they trusting in God? Did they believe that he was going to fulfill his promises? Not really. I want to pick up the story a couple of chapters later in chapter 15, beginning with verse 1.
Scripture Reading #2: Genesis 15:3-6
3 And Abram said, "You have given me no offspring, and so a slave born in my house is to be my heir." 4 But the word of the Lord came to him, "This man shall not be your heir; no one but your very own issue shall be your heir." 5 He brought him outside and said, "Look toward heaven and count the stars, if you are able to count them." Then he said to him, "So shall your descendants be." 6 And he believed the Lord; and the Lord reckoned it to him as righteousness. (NRSV)
Abram believed him. He trusted. And I don’t want you to miss this verse because it is shows up again and again in the New Testament. Abram believed God. What does this mean? Here it means that he trusted God to keep his promises, to do what he said that he was going to do. Abram doesn’t DO anything. He trusts God to do it.
And so? It says that it is reckoned to him as righteousness. It would take a sermon itself to completely unpack this. But in short it means that God looked on Abram’s trust, on the fact that he received God’s promise and believed that God would do it, and God considered it be as Abram’s own goodness. We might think of it as God crediting his account.
The word here is “righteousness” which often means being in a right relationship. So, God looks at Abram’s trust as counting, as being good enough to qualify him for a right relationship with God.
God fulfilled the promises that he made to Abraham in the most unexpected ways. There was a promised land that was the literal land of Israel. He did provide a multitude of descendants known as the Israelites. But he had more in mind. It was in the person of Jesus that the blessings of the Israelites, the heirs of God’s promises, were offered to all nations. God’s salvation promised to Abraham was offered to all of us in Jesus. And so, to all of us who receive him, we become part of God’s people. We are numbered among the descendents of Abraham. We too have a promised land. The promises that God made to Abraham are our promises as well.
But how do they become ours? What do we need to do? Do we need to keep all of God’s commandments? Do we need to never have a sinful thought again? Just how good do we need to be?
Remember the verse: “Abraham believed the Lord, the Lord reckoned it to him as righteousness.” All we have to do is believe God’s promises and to take him at his Word, and to receive what he has done for us in Jesus.
God has accomplished in Christ all that ever needed to be done, so that we could be in a right relationship with him, so we could be forgiven, saved, and given new life. He did all that could be done to make us whole and to set us on the road to new life. The question is whether or not we will believe this to be true for us.
Trust the Road to Righteousness
In our small groups this past Fall we watched some videos by pastor Rob Bell. He tells the following story in a book that he wrote:
I was having breakfast with my dad and my younger son. As we were finishing our meal, I noticed that the waitress brought our check, then took it away, and then brought it back again. She placed it on the table, smiled, and said: "Somebody in the restaurant paid for your meal. You're all set." And then she walked away.
I had the strangest feeling sitting there. The feeling was helplessness. There was nothing I could do. It had been taken care of. To insist on paying would have been pointless. All I could do was trust that what she said was actually true and then live in that—which meant getting up and leaving the restaurant. My acceptance of what she said gave me a choice: to live like it was true or to create my own reality in which the bill was not paid.
That is our invitation—to trust that we don't owe anything. To trust that something is already true about us, something has already been done, something has been there all along.
To trust that grace pays the bill.
God has fulfilled his promises in Jesus. He has secured our salvation. We don’t have to achieve it or earn it. We just have to receive it and trust that God has already done it. This can be hard, because it can leave us feeling like Rob Bell felt, helpless. We want to take responsibility for our lives. We want to be self-made people. But that is not that way a relationship works with the promise-keeping God.
Can you do it? Can you lay aside your pride, your guilt, your insecurity, and trust that God has saved to, and to trust that he has extended to you a free offer, and to trust that all you have to do is receive it. Then, you just need to live as if it is true.