Today we celebrate the first of four weeks of Advent. As many of you know, Advent is a season observed in many Western Christian churches as a time of expectant waiting and preparation for the celebration of the birth of Jesus on Christmas Day. The term, Advent, is from the Latin word meaning, "Coming". Thus, the first Advent relates to the Messiah’s first coming. The Second Advent is something Jesus promised and is not yet fulfilled.
My text for
today’s message comes from Luke’s gospel, beginning at v erse 21 and the
familiar scene when Joseph and Mary brought Jesus into the Temple for His
circumcision according to the Law of Moses:
(Luke 2:25-32) “And there was a man in Jerusalem whose name was Simeon; and this man was righteous and devout, looking for the consolation of Israel; and the Holy Spirit was upon him. And it had been revealed to him by the Holy Spirit that he would not see death before he had seen the Lord’s Christ. And he came in the Spirit into the temple; and . . . . took Him into his arms, and blessed God, and said, “Now Lord, You are releasing Your bond-servant to depart in peace, according to Your word; For my eyes have seen Your salvation, which You have prepared in the presence of all peoples, A Light of revelation to the Gentiles.” . . . And Simeon blessed them and said to Mary His mother, “Behold, this Child is appointed for the fall and rise of many in Israel, and for a sign to be opposed— and a sword will pierce even your own soul—to the end that thoughts from many hearts may be revealed.”
Now while we could spend several weeks peeling back this short vignette, I want to draw out three points from this scene. First, let’s look at verse 30 in which Simeon says to God, “My eyes have seen your salvation . . .”
I will say it now as clearly as I know how: God is not mad at you. God is not looking for ways to have His revenge on you. God is not planning to punish you in the very least for your sins He covered with the precious blood of His Son.
The stunning, unexpected, and truly unimaginable truth about what God did to secure our salvation should clearly prove once and for all time – He’s not mad at you. The idea that God is still planning to take any of His children born of their faith in Christ’s atoning sacrifice – to take them to the proverbial woodshed originates in the very bowels of hell itself.
Some like to joke among themselves about Catholic guilt, or Baptist guilt, or whatever guilt – but such things are nothing to joke about. Such foolishness does nothing more than drag a dark shadow across our lives as we wait for God’s judgment to fall on us. So, when Simeon said to God, as He held the baby Jesus in his arms: “My eyes have seen your salvation” – there’s a principle here that I don’t want any of us to miss. And that principle is this:
We need to learn to hold Jesus in our arms – not the baby Jesus, but the crucified Jesus. We need to see ourselves at Golgotha’s hill on that day when Jesus died. We need to see in our mind’s eye His bruised and bloodied body – bruised and broken in OUR place, as OUR substitute.
As the prophet promised some 700 years before Jesus was born: (Isaiah 53:5-6, ISV) “But He was wounded for our transgressions; He was bruised for our iniquities. The chastisement of our peace was upon Him, and with His stripes we are healed. All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and the Lord hath laid on Him the iniquity of us all.”
We need to see ourselves cradling his lifeless head in our lap as we kneel there with His mother, Mary, and the apostle John, and His other disciples. There, in our lap, we must see our dead Lord because He is our salvation.
This is not to say God does not judge our sin. Please do not misunderstand me. The Bible from one cover to the other teaches with the most sober earnestness that God will not let His children – children who have been adopted into His family only through the blood of His Son – God will not let us live in sin without His discipline.
But why does God discipline us? To restore us to Himself. But that He stands at the edge of heaven just waiting for a chance to whip us – you’ll never find such a principle in Scripture. Never.
But so many of us are so conditioned by poor teaching to believe God is out to strike us – whether that poor teaching originates with our parents, or some pastors, or deacons, or Bible teachers – we are so conditioned to believe that kind of terrible theology that we are often paralyzed from doing anything useful for the kingdom.
That kind of guilt-riddled fear has a name for it. It’s called ‘Scrupulosity.” Scrupulosity is a PATHOLOGICAL over-emphasis on the anger of God to the EXCLUSION of the biblical truth of God’s mercy, compassion and love for you and me. Listen to what God assures us in Paul’s letter to the Christians at Rome:
(Romans 5:8-10) “But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. Much more then, having now been justified [declared guiltless] by His blood, we shall be saved from the wrath of God through Him. 10 For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God through the death of His Son, much more, having been reconciled, we shall be saved by His life.”
Jesus’ first Advent brought humanity of the past – AND of the present – the means of salvation, the means of receiving the eternal remission of sins, the means of being completely, conclusively, and irrefutably cleansed of even the stain of those sins we’ve brought to Him in confession. So far removed are our remitted sins, God considers them as having never been committed.
We have to get that. God considers our remitted sins as having never been committed. And so, no wonder we should have confidence that He is not planning to ever, ever, ever punish us for the sins covered by the blood of Jesus.
Simeon said, My eyes have seen His salvation. So, my brothers and sisters here in this room: Have YOUR eyes seen your salvation? John 3:16 is forever true to those who claim it for themselves: “For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life. For God did not send the Son into the world to judge the world, but that the world might be saved through Him.
Listen to it again on the authority of God’s word. God loves you.
But we must not leave it there at that point – that God has remitted our confessed sins. It is equally true that that remission of our sins cost HIM a lot – a lot more than you and I will probably ever fully comprehend this side of life or on the other side. It cost our God an enormous price to redeem us, to reconcile us to Himself, and for that reason alone we should practice living circumspectly, being careful day after day to walk in a manner worthy of our calling as God’s child.
Let me take just a moment on this first Sunday of Advent to remind us of what the remission of our sins cost God on that Good Friday two thousand years ago.
It
began with flogging. Roman soldiers fashioned a leather whip, studded with
small rocks and bone. Every blow against Jesus’ back ripped open new strips of
skin. His muscles and tendons quickly turned into a mass of quivering, bleeding
flesh. Many prisoners died of shock and blood loss long before being nailed to
the cross.
After the beating, Jesus dragged his cross to the execution site where soldiers
dropped it on the ground and threw Him onto it. The spikes hammered through His
wrists and feet tore through agonizingly sensitive nerves sending waves of electrifying
pain exploding along His limbs.
As He hung between heaven and earth, breathing became an all-consuming
struggle. Gravity pulled inexorably on His diaphragm, forcing Jesus to
repeatedly push against His feet and flex His arms just to breathe. Yet, every
movement heightened the strain on His ravaged nerves, and each breath forced
His back against the splintered wood, reopening the raw wounds.
But that is not at all the end of it. Because the Father placed your sins and my sins on His Son – as St. Paul tells us in 2 Corinthians 5 – Jesus BECAME sin. No wonder He cried out to His Father, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” For the first time in eternity, that intimate relationship Jesus had with His Father was somehow broken when He BECAME our sin – so that we might BECOME His righteousness.
Which brings us back to Simeon’s prophecy as he proclaimed Jesus would be: “A light of revelation to the Gentiles and the glory of Your people Israel” (v. 32)
A light of revelation. I wonder if Simeon was thinking of Isaiah’s prophecy seven centuries earlier. Here is what Isaiah wrote in chapter 9 of his book: “The people who walk in darkness will see a great light; Those who live in a dark land, the light will shine on them.
St Matthew applied this text to Jesus in the fourth chapter of his gospel. When Jesus left Nazareth and settled in Capernaum, Matthew wrote: This was to fulfill what was spoken through Isaiah the prophet: “The land of Zebulun and the land of Naphtali . . . “The people who were sitting in darkness saw a great Light, And those who were sitting in the land and shadow of death, Upon them a Light dawned.”
And then notice the very next verse of Matthew 4: “From that time Jesus began to preach and say, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.”
The first recorded words of Jesus to the crowd after His baptism have to do with repentance. In other words, if you and I hope to see heaven, we must as often as needed admit to God we are wrong, and He is right. And we must turn from our path of sin.
It is hard to walk in darkness. We are all very familiar with how sin’s darkness has crushed our lives and the lives of those we love. We have all lived long enough to actually SEE with our own eyes how anger and jealousy and hatred and self-abuse and addictions and carousing and greed has over the years shriveled the facial features and twisted the bodies of the ones overcome by those dark emotions. But by stark contrast we have also lived long enough to see the glow of the lives of those who, for years, have walked in God’s light.
Why do some prefer to walk in darkness when the light so softly beckons? Jesus tells us why in John 3: . . . men have preferred darkness to light because their deeds are evil. Anybody who does wrong hates the light and keeps away from it, for fear his deeds may be exposed. But anybody who is living by the truth will come to the light to make it plain that all he has done has been done through God.” (JB Phillips)
And so that is why, just after those verses in Matthew about the light shining on those who walked in darkness, that is why Jesus warned His listeners in the first century, and He warns His listeners in every century: REPENT. Be converted. Believe and LIVE the gospel.
If we are not converted – transformed – BORN AGAIN -- when we came to Christ, if our lives did not change when we came to Christ, if we continue to essentially live our lives as we had lived before coming to Christ – then we really must search our souls. ARE WE REALLY CONVERTED? Are we really born again? Or have we simply made an intellectual assent to the gospel story?
Which brings us to my next and final point: (Verse 35) “Simeon looked at Mary and told her, “A sword will piece even your own soul . . ..”
It is any mother’s nightmare to bury a child. Some of you in this room know what I am talking about. But much more than burying a child is to also watch helplessly as he or she is tortured to death.
Yes, a sword pierced Mary’s heart. But I must also ask myself, “Does a sword pierce MY heart over MY sins that led to His torturous death?”
That is a very serious question. Many Christians having learned from childhood that Jesus died to save them from the judgment of their sins, but take very little time as adults to reflect on just how dark, how distorted, how vile, how disfigured, how putrefying, how shameful, repugnant, and loathsome are their sins. So many of us become inured – accustomed to and hardened against our sins – that we become almost cavalier about them.
I appeal to you, as well as to myself, to ask the Holy Spirit each day – maybe at the end of the day, before sleep -- to reveal not only our sins, but the depth of those sins for which we must confess and from which we need to turn. And, if we find we are continuing week after week coming to Him with the same sin – maybe we truly have not determined to walk away from that sin and to do whatever it takes to keep away from it.
Better to learn that now, and be able to deal with that sin now, than be faced with it at the Judgment.
The First Advent is so much more than a Baby in a manger under a starry Bethlehem sky and surrounded by lowing cattle and the rustle of straw in the stalls. It is about our RESCUE from the grip of sin. It is about God demonstrating in the most tangible way His adoring love for you and me. It is about our most precious opportunity to remain in a guilt-free relationship with our Creator as we bring our sins to the confessional at the foot of the cross on which our Savior died.
Would you bow your heads and pray along with me to God this prayer of repentance and, at the same time, appeal to the Lord Jesus to fill you and me once again with His holiness? Many of you will recognize this prayer of David, written after his sin with Bathsheba. Psalm 51:
Be gracious to me, O God, according to Your lovingkindness; According to the greatness of Your compassion blot out my transgressions. Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity And cleanse me from my sin. For I know my transgressions, And my sin is ever before me. Against You, You only, I have sinned And done what is evil in Your sight, So that You are justified when You speak And blameless when You judge.. . . Hide Your face from my sins And blot out all my iniquities. Create in me a clean heart, O God, And renew a steadfast spirit within me. Do not cast me away from Your presence And do not take Your Holy Spirit from me. Restore to me the joy of Your salvation . . .
For Christ’s honor and glory alone. Amen
No comments:
Post a Comment