Sermon
July 4,
2021
Something
Beautiful. Something Good
"And we know that God
causes all things to work together for good to those who love God, to
those who are called according to His purpose. For those whom He foreknew, He also predestined to
become conformed to the image of His Son, so that He would be
the firstborn among many brethren; and
these whom He predestined, He also called; and these whom He called,
He also justified; and these whom He justified, He also glorified. What
then shall we say to these things? If God is for us,
who is against us? He who did not spare His own Son,
but delivered Him over for us all, how will He not also with Him freely
give us all things? (Romans 8:28-32)
As I said, this is a crucial truth – and because it is such a crucial truth, Satan does all he can do to rob us of it. And we should not be surprised that he would do so, that he would whisper his subtle and malicious lies especially when we are in despair, when life has gone terribly awry.
I love the phrase in this verse: ‘God Causes.’ It should always remind us that the Almighty Sovereign Creator of all things visible and invisible – the One who by His own authority and power physically holds all things in place and together – this is the One who causes all things to work out for GOOD.
How does He do that, even with evil? I have no idea. No one does. But we know He does and WILL cause even evil to work for good because – well, because He is God, and because He said He would.
Think of it from a position of logic. If God were NOT ABLE to do something, anything, even to cause good to come from evil, then not only would He NOT be almighty God, but we would be of all people most to be pitied because we follow a god who is not only impotent, but who is also a false god.
It is no accident that the Holy Spirit placed in the Proverbs of Solomon a text well known to many Christians, “Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding.” (Proverbs 3:5)
Neither is it an accident that God tells us through the prophet Isaiah (55:8-9): “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways . . . . As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.”
In other words, Almighty God wants us to trust HIM, and not ourselves. He wants us to trust HIS plan for us, and not our own expectations.
Why can we – indeed, why SHOULD we -- trust God implicitly, even as difficult as it is for most of us to trust the Sovereign Lord implicitly with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength?
Well, we should because He has demonstrated again and again and for all time that He has OUR best interests in His mind. Always. At all times. As St Paul tells us in this passage from Romans 8: “He who spared not His own Son, but delivered Him up for us all, how will He not also with Him freely give us all things?”
Listen! A disciple is not above his Master. We will do well if we only become like our master. Jesus suffered the slings and arrows of severe testing, and we should not expect to escape similar testing. Let me remind you of only two events in the Lord’s life recorded for us in Scripture to demonstrate Jesus knows what it is like to be tested.
I mentioned this last week, and I do so again to emphasize the point: At the very beginning of His ministry, just after His baptism, St. Mark tells us the Spirit IMPELLED Jesus into the wilderness to be tested by the devil.
It seems from the text in the gospels that Satan tried to get Jesus to either ‘prove’ His deity, or Satan tried to get Jesus to question His relationship with the Father.
Whatever Satan’s rationale, we must remember that the Son of God was as human as you and I – and just as susceptible to temptation as you and I. That is why the devil challenged Him: “If You are the Son of God, command that these stones become bread.” . . . “If You are the Son of God, throw Yourself down [from the pinnacle of this temple].”
Has the devil ever accused you in the midst of our personal wildernesses, “If you REALLY are God’s child, if God REALLY loved you, if He really cared about you, do you think you’d be going through what you’re going through?”
So the wilderness test is how Jesus BEGAN His ministry. And not surprisingly – for whatever evil that the devil does should not surprise us – Jesus ended His mission on earth with similar demonic insinuations.
While hanging on that cross between heaven and earth, between life and death, Satan moved the mob to mock the Lord, “If You are the Son of God, come down from the cross.”
At the same time the religious leaders mocked the Lord saying: “He saved others; He cannot save Himself. He is the King of Israel; let Him now come down from the cross, and we will believe in Him. He trusts in God; let God rescue Him now, if He delights in Him; for He said, ‘I am the Son of God.’” (Matthew 27:40-43)
But – and this is the point of Romans 8:28 – God the Father caused both of those terrible tests of His Son – in the wilderness and on the Cross – God caused them both to turn out for good. How is that?
If the 100% human Jesus had failed the test in the wilderness, then He would not have been our sinless savior. If He had sinned, if He had fallen for those demonic seductions, then He could never have taken away OUR sins. He would have eventually died and paid the penalty for HIS OWN sins – for the wages of sin is death, regardless of who it is who sinned.
And if Jesus had not endured to His last breath His agonizing death on that cross, then you and I would be today without hope of eternal life because Jesus would not have become our substitutionary sacrificial atonement for our sins.
Let me remind you of another example of how God turns evil into good. We find the story in Genesis. Joseph's brothers planned to kill him, but then decided to sell him into slavery instead. We won’t take time to rehearse what happened to Joseph in the intervening seventeen years – years that included imprisonment for some trumped-up charges, but Joseph ends up being the vice-regent of Egypt. After a famine spread across Egypt and Israel, Joseph’s brothers went down to Egypt to buy grain and eventually discovered Joseph was not only alive – but he was the one who controlled the storehouses. Within a short time, Joseph’s brothers, their families, and their father Jacob move to Egypt where they prospered. And so, the years passed. But after Jacob died, the brothers become frightened that Joseph might decide it’s now payback time.
But here is what Joseph said to them: "As for you, you meant evil against me. But God meant it for good, to bring about this present result, to preserve many people alive" (Genesis 50:20).
Joseph did not dilute his brothers' sin. He recognized it -- and he forced them to do the same. But Joseph also looked beyond the past and to the power of God to turn even evil into something good.
One more story and I will move to close this message.
It has to do with the story of Naomi and Ruth.
Naomi – her name means “pleasant” – and her husband left
Israel during another famine that swept across the land. After they settled in Moab, their
two sons married Moabite women. But over the course of the next several years,
Naomi’s husband died. Then her two sons died, and Naomi was left alone and devastated
by her triple tragedy.
When she and Ruth – the wife of one of her deceased sons – arrived back in
Israel, the people of her hometown greeted her with unmuted excitement. But
Naomi, her grief still raw, quieted them and said, “Do not call me Naomi;
call me Mara [which means, ‘bitterness’] for the Almighty has dealt very
bitterly with me” (Ruth 1:19-21).
It’s not hard to empathize with Naomi’s despair. Life threw her to the ground,
and then kicked her in the gut as she lay writhing in the dirt. And she did
what so many of us are often so quick to do: She blamed God for her tragedies.
Who doesn’t understand Naomi? Deep and gut-wrenching loss. Death. Debilitating
injury. Chronic and life-altering illness. Financial disaster. It is a rare,
rare person who gets through life unscathed by heartbreak. And it is
little wonder that so many people – even those of us in the Church,
children of God as we are, who’ve heard for years about faith and trust – we’ve
heard it from pulpits and books and Bible studies; We’ve sung the hymns
extolling God’s love – and yet even we can find ourselves embittered about
life.
And even embittered about God.
Ah! But God works it all together for good. Naomi didn't know it – in fact, she
never discovered it – but through her tragedy, her daughter-in-law
married a man named Boaz. Their son, Obed, had a son named Jesse. Jesse
had seven sons, one of whom was named David.
David’s distant offspring was named Jesus.
Naomi didn’t know – as many of us today don’t know, especially when we are in
the throes of our bitterness – that God really does know what we go
through. And He really is able to orchestrate events and people
and circumstances in and through our lives to ultimately give birth to a
wondrous beginning.
God really is able to cause all things to work together for good, to
those who love Him and are called according to His purposes.
Life can be full of pleasantness, or full of bitterness. But circumstances
themselves do not have the power to decide which of the two will rule us. Only
our trust in the trustworthy God – or our lack of it – will determine what we
call ourselves. Naomi . . . Or Mara.
Please, God, cause us to pay close attention to these closing words of St Paul to the Christians at Rome in this eighth chapter – written to Christians struggling with their own life-issues. Christians who’d lost loved ones. Christians who feared what their government might do to them because of their faith; Christians to whom Satan had whispered one lie after another – “If you really ARE a child of God, why are you suffering as you are?”; Christians who’d heard often enough from their neighbors, even from their families – “Jesus healed others. Jesus rescued others. Jesus helped others – why is He ignoring YOU?”
Listen to how St. Paul – who certainly had experienced his share of physical suffering and depravation and loneliness and fear –listen to what He told his readers in Rome – listen, because God the Holy Spirit is now, as you listen to me, the Holy Spirit is telling you and me now this very thing:
If God is for us, who is against us? He who did not spare His own Son, but delivered Him over for us all, how will He not also with Him freely give us all things? Who will bring a charge against God’s elect? God is the one who justifies; who is the one who condemns? Christ Jesus is He who died, yes, rather who was raised, who is at the right hand of God, who also intercedes for us. Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? Just as it is written, “For Your sake we are being put to death all day long; We were considered as sheep to be slaughtered.”
"But in all these things we overwhelmingly conquer through Him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other created thing, will be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord."
God
causes all things to work together for good because God is absolutely,
unequivocally sovereign over all circumstances of every life, down to our next
heartbeat and next breath. He never sleeps. He never blinks. He never gets
distracted by something or someone more ‘important’ than any of us.
God does not cause evil – But God DOES redeem that evil in our lives to make something beautiful. The lyrics of this song by Bill Gaither are not just wishful thinking. They are rooted squarely in God’s word:
Something
beautiful, something good
All my confusion He understood
All I had to offer Him was brokenness
and strife
But he made something beautiful of my life
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