Exceeding Great and Precious Promises

Exceeding Great and Precious Promises

I am getting my blog up and running again.

     Exceeding Great and Precious Promises

Copyright 2019 by Everett Wilson

 

Whereby are given unto us exceeding great and precious promises: that by these ye might be partakers of the divine nature, having escaped the corruption that is in the world through lust. --2 Peter 1:4

I am using the King James version for this text because it is blunt where a euphemism may  dodge the point. I also have a text within a text, because Peter does not develop what the exceeding great and precious promises are.

Corruption, or rottenness, is in the world because of human lust, not because God willed it or designed it.  Yes, God made the fruit of the tree from which Adam and Eve ate, but they ate it because they didn’t want what God wanted for them--the glorious liberty of the children of God.  

But that is nothing but context.  I am interested in those exceeding great and precious promises we have been given and how we may escape corruption through them. We do not escape because God makes the promises, but because we keep them. The promises are from God and the power to keep them are also from God.   Grace is a summary word for them; It is the standard English translation of the Greek used in the New Testament to  translate God’s covenant love.

Blessedness and grace are not precise synonyms, but one may say as a working hypothesis that blessing is the application of grace as it pertains in specific cases--legal, moral, emotional,  and so on.

When we try to do that we often make a mess of it, but God in his omnipotence gets it right; all we want or need to know will be revealed on judgment day.

In the meantime, none of us knows much because what we know is distorted by what we feel.

so we cope--humbly, we hope.  At least we think we are coping, or pretending we are Christians who have committed themselves to the Bible as the word of God and to the “household of God, which is the church  of the living God, the pillar and bulwark of the truth,” as most covenant people claim to do, at least have a starting point in any conversation.

The promises are not bromides, or guideposts, or sentimentalities.  Peter said they are the means by which we escape the corruption is in the world through lust. They have great power, but they must be intentionally employed; they do not kick in on their own.

After some seventy years of life as a Christian I have not internalized how much we live on promises, so I have not been disciplined in my stewardship of them--even of the exceeding and great life-saving promises by which we escape the corruption that is in the world through lust. What is that, anyway, more than a preacher’s fancy wordplay?

I’m afraid it is even less than that. Here is my provisional definition:  The corruption that is in the world through lust is getting what we want as soon as we want it.  So here are some of the exceeding great and precious promises by which we escape the corruption.

There are several passages in the New Testament that list exceeding great and precious promises,  but I am going to begin with Philippians 4:8 as one of the most forthright:

Whatever is true, whatever is noble,whatever is right, whatever is pure,

whatever is lovely,whatever is admirable,

if anything is excellent or praiseworthy,  think `about such things:

and the God of peace will be with you.

     Exceeding Great and Precious Promises

Copyright 2019 by Everett Wilson

 

Whereby are given unto us exceeding great and precious promises: that by these ye might be partakers of the divine nature, having escaped the corruption that is in the world through lust. --2 Peter 1:4

I am using the King James version for this text because it is blunt where a euphemism may dodge the point. I also have a text within a text, because Peter does not develop what the exceeding great and precious promises are.

Corruption, or rottenness, is in the world because of human lust, not because God willed it or designed it.  Yes, God made the fruit of the tree from which Adam and Eve ate, but they ate it because they didn’t want what God wanted for them--the glorious liberty of the children of God.  

But that is nothing but context.  I am interested in those exceeding great and precious promises we have been given and how we may escape corruption through them. We do not escape because God makes the promises, but because we keep them. The promises are from God and the power to keep them are also from God.   Grace is a summary word for them; It is the standard English translation of the Greek used in the New Testament to  translate God’s covenant love.

Blessedness and grace are not precise synonyms, but one may say as a working hypothesis that blessing is the application of grace as it pertains in specific cases--legal, moral, emotional,  and so on.

When we try to do that we often make a mess of it, but God in his omnipotence gets it right; all we want or need to know will be revealed on judgment day.

In the meantime, none of us knows much because what we know is distorted by what we feel.

so we cope--humbly, we hope.  At least we think we are coping, or pretending we are Christians who have committed themselves to the Bible as the word of God and to the “household of God, which is the church  of the living God, the pillar and bulwark of the truth,” as most covenant people claim to do, at least have a starting point in any conversation.

The promises are not bromides, or guideposts, or sentimentalities.  Peter said they are the means by which we escape the corruption is in the world through lust. They have great power, but they must be intentionally employed; they do not kick in on their own.

After some seventy years of life as a Christian I have not internalized how much we live on promises, so I have not been disciplined in my stewardship of them--even of the exceeding and great life-saving promises by which we escape the corruption that is in the world through lust. What is that,

anyway, more than a preacher’s fancy wordplay?

I’m afraid it is even less than that. Here is my provisional definition:  The corruption that is in the world through lust is getting what we want as soon as we want it.  So here are are some of the exceeding great and precious promises by which we escape the corruption.

There are several passages in the New Testament that list exceeding great and precious promises,  but I am going to begin with Philippians 4:8 as one of the most forthright:

Whatever is true, whatever is noble,whatever is right, whatever is pure,

whatever is lovely,whatever is admirable, if anything is excellent or praiseworthy,  think `about such things: and the God of peace will be with you.

Deliverance from Evil

Deliverance from Evil

Luke 4:1-13

By Everett Wilson, Pastor

Everything Jesus says to the devil is true, and everything the devil says to Jesus is false. We believe that, most of the time.

Þ When we are full, it’s no trouble to say that we do not live by bread alone, because we’re full; we’re not thinking about food. But Jesus was famished when he l said it.

Þ When we are in church or at prayer, it’s not hard to declare that we serve God alone; but Jesus said it when the devil was trying to distract him with all the kingdoms of the world.

Þ And when we are perfectly safe and everything is okay, why should we put God to the test? But Jesus refused to do it when he was in grave physical danger.

In his three responses to the devil Jesus shows us what he meant when taught us to pray deliver us from evil.

To ask this of God makes a heavy demand on him, and an even heavier demand upon ourselves. So before we ask it, we must realize there are things we can’t believe if we are going to pray this prayer, and things we must believe if we are going to pray it.

We can’t believe that physical survival is the meaning of life. Any argument for believing it is cancelled by the fact of death. So you live to be eighty; big deal, says the Bible.

⁹For all our days pass away under your wrath;
our years come to an end like a sigh.
¹⁰The days of our life are seventy years,
or perhaps eighty, if we are strong;
even then their span is only toil and trouble;
they are soon gone, and we fly away (Ps 90).

When we think we are going to live forever—that is, when we disagree with the Bible—the idea of physical survival as the meaning of life is an attractive one.

If you live by bread alone, you can’t be delivered from evil because you are too easily suckered. You would turn a rock into a loaf of bread in a second! Why not, if you or your kids were hungry? What’s more important than physical survival?

The key moment in the novel and movie Gone with the Wind, comes after Scarlett O’Hara flees Atlanta with her little boy, her cousin Melanie, and Melanie’s tiny baby. Scarlett herself is barely out of her teens. She comes to her family plantation only to find her mother dead, her father devastated, and the plantation neglected. She stands in the ruined garden, and tries to eat a raw carrot but gags on it. Then she lifts her fist to heaven and speaks for herself and her loved ones. “If I live through this, as God is my witness, I’ll never be hungry again.” She will keep her vow if she has to lie, cheat, and steal to do it. She lives by bread alone.

But you don’t have to be as desperate as Scarlett to live by bread alone. Do you remember Esau and Jacob in the book of Genesis?

Esau said to Jacob, ‘Let me eat some of that red stuff, for I am famished!’ . . .. Jacob said, ‘First sell me your birthright.’ Esau said, ‘I am about to die; of what use is a birthright to me?’ Jacob said, ‘Swear to me first.’ So he swore to him, and sold his birthright to Jacob. Then Jacob gave Esau bread and lentil stew, and he ate and drank, and rose and went his way. Thus Esau despised his birthright.

Genesis 25:30-34.

Esau believed more in that lentil stew, that bean soup, than he believed in his own future.

Esau probably hadn’t thought about it much; from what he said, it doesn’t sound like he did. But Jesus had thought about it. The truth was ingrained in him. We do not live by bread alone. Even when your family is homeless and you don’t know where your next meal is coming from, you still do not live by bread alone.

If we believe that we live by bread alone, we hamper God’s ability to deliver us from evil—because what we believe How can a person who agree with the lies of the Tempter, and thinks that the devil has it right, be delivered from the evil of selfishness?

But the kids still need to fed! You still need a place to stay! Yes indeed; and when they have been fed and put to bed, they will have to be fed and put to bed until eventually they are doing it for their children. After they die their descendants will carry on. In the meantime, what are they going to do when the neighbor’s kids have food and yours doesn’t? Steal it? Fight over it? Or will they learn that life is more than physical survival?

Jesus was not tempted to steal, but he was tempted to cheat by turning a stone into a loaf of bread. No one would be hurt by it. So why didn’t he do it? Because the word came from the mouth of the devil, not from the mouth of the Lord.

To the unbeliever it makes no difference who suggests it, if it is what you feel you must do. In the godless thinking of our day The question is not what is right or wrong, true or false, but what’s the harm? If I can’t think of anybody I’ve harmed, what difference does it make?

Such a one has no idea what Jesus is talking about when he says that we live by every word that comes from the mouth of God.

In a T.S. Eliot play, a mature young woman cannot understand why she feels a sense of sin. Her counselor asks her what she thinks sin is. She is not a believer, so has to think about it. “I suppose it is doing something immoral. But I have done nothing immoral.” As it happens, she has committed adultery; but the man’s wife hadn’t seem to care. “I didn’t take anything from her. Not anything she wanted.”

She doesn’t see the logical conclusion of her thinking: If adultery is meaningless, so is marriage.

All of the devil’s suggestions are meaningless, because everything he suggests are done for the wrong reasons. Right reasons come only from the mouth of God, not from the Evil one. Even that stone doesn’t belong to the devil. He has no right to it. All he can do is tell lies about it.

Jesus knows that we live by bread, but not by bread alone. The bread is God’s gift, given in God’s way: like all of God’s gifts, by every word that comes from the mouth of God, the Word of God.

By Every Word

Every caught my attention this time. Every word includes a lot of words! God speaks nothing but truth, and we cannot live except by the truth. What is untrue cannot stand; the way of death is the way of untruth.

By every word means that we cannot choose which words to live by. To obey the law of God, we have to go to the heart of the matter, says James 2, which is the royal law according to the scripture, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself .’

If you don’t do that, says James, but try to choose which words you will obey, you will find the words you have not chosen condemning you. For the one who said, ‘You shall not commit adultery’, also said, ‘You shall not murder.’ Now if you do not commit adultery but if you murder, you have become a transgressor of the law.

The other two responses to temptation, to worship and serve the Lord alone, and to refuse to put God to the test, are simply applications of the truth that we live by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God. Temptation distorts reality. The Word of God clarifies it.

The story begins with the word that Jesus was led by the Spirit in the wilderness, where he was tempted. Jesus taught us to ask God not to lead us into temptation, but he seemed to have led Jesus! In the prayer, Jesus assumes we’ll be tempted anyway, as he was, for we are to ask for deliverance from evil.

Jesus was delivered from evil, but no miracle was involved except the miracle of the word of God. In the midst temptation, remember that the Word of God, not your appetites, is to guide your behavior; remember that you have but God alone to serve; and remember that you do not to have to test God, because you are on his side! Amen.

A Charge to Keep
Psalm 71:17-19

By Everett Wilson, Pastor

A hymn that didn’t make it into the blue hymnal is “A Charge to Keep I Have,” by Charles Wesley.

Like many hymns, parts of it are better than others. In this particular one, the first stanza sounds like the main task of our lives is getting ourselves to heaven—which is not what the Bible says. The Bible says that Jesus gets us to heaven by dying for us on the cross. But the second stanza is more on target.

To serve the  present age,

 my calling to fulfill;

O may it all my powers engage 

to do my Master's will!

It appears that Wesley got the idea from biblical commentator Matthew Henry, who wrote this:

We have every one of us a charge to keep, an eternal God to glorify, an immortal soul to provide for, needful duty to be done, our generation to serve; and it must be our daily care to keep this charge, for it is the charge of the Lord our Master.

In the Bible, there are specific, one-time things to do, —like helping to feed the five thousand, let’s say, or marching around Jericho seven times. A charge to keep is more than that. It is a pattern of behavior which becomes a way of life, as in these charges from the lips of Jesus himself:

· Love one another, as I have loved you.

· Go and make disciples of all nations.

· Abide in me.

· Give, and it shall be given you.

If we search the scriptures for them, we will find plenty of these charges to keep. Jesus was pretty plainspoken when it came to telling people how to live.

But the charge to keep I have for you this morning is from the book of Psalms, and predates Jesus by about a thousand years.

O God, from my youth you have taught me,
and I still proclaim your wondrous deeds.
So even to old age and grey hairs,
O God, do not forsake me,
until I proclaim your might
to all the generations to come.

I stand here with grey hairs, in old age, still proclaiming the wondrous deeds of God. Fads a-plenty have come and gone in the fifty years since my first temporary pastoral appointment. but the message has not changed.

I know more now than I did then, but what I preached as true back then was true, so I still preach it as true. Slang changes, but the English language itself hasn’t changed much. The simple truth is as understandable today as it was fifty years ago, because it is simple, and because it is true.

This text could be my testimony, and if you have been a practicing Christian for a long time it could be yours too. Like the psalmist, we are taught by God, and we are witnesses to the work of God. Our relationship with God is not the defining fact of the gospel, but it is the defining fact of our lives.

Do you see the charge to keep in this psalm? Christians are the inheritors of the psalmist’s testimony. Ever since the resurrection of Jesus, one generation after another of his followers have had the opportunity to fulfill the pattern laid out in the psalm:

· we have the privilege of being continuously taught by God, if we seek to learn;

· we have the joy of proclaiming the wondrous deeds of God, unless we keep them secret;

· we have the responsibility to raise the next generation to repeat and expand what we have done, just as those who came before us raised us to repeat and expand what they had done.

Any believer can take these things to heart. You don’t have to be a preacher. The psalmist probably wasn’t a preacher but a king. Some scholars think that Psalm 71 is a continuation of Psalm 70; if so, then King David was the psalmist.

All of us—no matter what we do to earn our living— are taught by God, we may proclaim the wondrous deeds of God, and may raise the next generation to do the same.

We Are Learners

From youth we have been learners, and our teacher has been God himself. Learning is work, however, even with God as the teacher. When you learn something, you must work to understand it and then to take responsibility for knowing it. If you were taught but you did not learn, the teaching was a waste of time.

Faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the Word of God, is the New Testament’s way of saying it.

The truth doesn’t change, and faith doesn’t change; but because it is faith, its substance things hoped for, and its evidence things unseen, it needs constant renewal. If you have a good memory, you may remember the multiplication table as you memorized in the fourth grade; but the multiplication table is not a matter of faith. You can test the truth of it with a pocketful of change, or a few dozen eggs, or handful of toothpicks. The evidence for the multiplication table is visible everywhere.

For things unseen, we have to work at remembering. This is not a new technique at all. Moses did more than command the Israelites to hear that the Lord was God, and to love him with all they were and had. He also commanded them to

· Keep these words that I am commanding you today in your heart.

· Recite them to your children and talk about them when you are at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you rise.

· Bind them as a sign on your hand,

· fix them as an emblem on your forehead, and

· write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.

Maybe it looks as though he is exaggerating, but at least you get the impression that he felt strongly about it! We learn the gospel when we are young and we keep on learning it because we can’t monitor our spiritual life by our emotions. We can nurture it with our memories, the collective memory of the Bible and the church, and the individual memories of personal experience. We cannot always feel it, but we can always remember it and believe it, if we work at it. Working at it is part of the charge we have to keep.

We Are Witnesses

The learning is preparation for the task. The task in this psalm is twofold. First, we are witnesses. Our witness does not replace service, generosity, love, and sacrifice, which are charged in other places; but neither do they replace witness. The psalmist bore witness to the wondrous deeds of God; he was a witness to what he had learned and remembered, because he believed that God had done the things remembered.

We Pass It On

We all live between the generation that is past and the generation to come. We are all responsible for receiving from the one and giving to the other.

We witness to our own generation, and we pass it on to the next. It’s a bad deal when the people of God skip a generation in passing it on. Then it often takes more than one generation to recover, because the third and fourth generation must recover what the second generation either didn’t get or had totally forgotten.

The psalmist had his testimony not only because God had taught him, but because he had learned it, practiced it, and didn’t want it to end before he had passed it on. O God, do not forsake me, until I proclaim your might to all the generations to come.” Amen.

The Sixth Sign of Renewal

The Sixth Sign of Renewal

Nehemiah 8:1-10

By Everett Wilson, Pastor

Most of our attention is focused on local matters—our congregation, our neighborhood, our school, our family, our business. We think in the short-term, because local deadlines are more urgent and more dependent on us as individuals and families than big, long-range issues that we cannot do much about.

That's the way life is organized; these are the rows we are given to hoe, and they can get weedy very fast if we neglect them. On the other hand, things may improve just as quickly as they go bad; but that makes for another problem, as when your tomatoes ripen more quickly than you can pick or process them.

In small-scale operations we get used to quick outcomes, whether for good or for bad. A local church revival, for a more applicable example this morning, develops and dissipates more rapidly than a national one.

In Bible times, both disaster and recovery took longer than they do now, partly because communication, travel, and technology were much slower and more cumbersome, and partly because the Old Testament people thought of themselves as one people with a common destiny. They were first a tribe, then a nation; not first a congregation, then a denomination. The disasters were bigger and harder to undo. When things went bad, everything went bad, and on a large scale. When Nebuchadnezzar came to Jerusalem, he did not close a synagogue, or slaughter a village. He conquered the whole nation, destroyed its capital city of Jerusalem, and leveled the Temple of God. That was over a hundred years before the events recorded in the book of Nehemiah. It took that long after the disaster wrought by Nebuchadnezzar to bring the people to the moment when they gathered at the Water Gate to hear the reading of the Law. They had not come very far in a hundred years.

· the Temple had been rebuilt, but it was a homely and cheap imitation of the one it replaced.

· They had just finished rebuilding the city, but there was no King on the throne and no real army to defend the land.

They would not have even got this far without the cooperation and consent of the Persian emperors. After Nebuchadnezzar conquered Judah, the second book of Kings says Jerusalem was like a cup that had been rinsed out and turned over to drain. Now, so much later, the cup is barely half full. In the meantime, Persia has conquered Babylon, so Jerusalem is now part of the Persian Empire. The world had changed big time in that century.

There were signs of renewal, however. While the glory of Solomon had not returned to Jerusalem, the city was at least functioning again as a Jewish community. Things weren't as great as they had been 400 years before, but neither were they nearly as bad as they had been a hundred years before. The people of Israel were still greatly humbled, but they were also newly hopeful. Here are signs of renewal in the book of Nehemiah.

1. The prayer of Nehemiah in chapter one: They are your servants and your people, whom you redeemed by your great power and your strong hand. O, let your ear be attentive to the prayer of your servant, and to the prayer of your servants who delight in revering your name.

2. The commitment of Nehemiah in chapter 2, when he asks the Persian king for permission—and provisions— to rebuild Jerusalem.

3. The rebuilding of the wall by the men of the city, "for the people had a mind to work."

4. The return of thousands of people to Judah, to take up their lives in their homeland once more.

5. The gifts of the people toward the common work.

Renewal is the work of God, but the signs of it show in the response of the people. These five signs have their parallels in modern church renewal too:

· Earnest prayer;

· bold decision;

· a building (or other) project requiring high energy and sacrifice;

· the gathering of the people;

· their generous giving to the common cause.

These are so exciting and encouraging that people may easily believe that renewal has occurred if these five signs are present. They may believe it if only one or two are present. But a sixth sign must be evident if the renewal is to last: commitment to the Word of God. So, after building the wall, after moving into their homes and settling down, and after establishing some sense of permanence in the land, They told the scribe Ezra to bring the book of the law of Moses, which the Lord had given to Israel.

They did not want just to look new; they wanted to be new. They had the law of the Lord written on a scroll, but they needed it written on their hearts. They needed God to rule their nation and their lives. That is why they stood there for hours while the law was read: and the ears of all the people were attentive to the book of the law. What does "all" mean? Both men and women and all who could hear with understanding. Who besides men and women? Apparently, every child old enough to understand. This was a universal sign, with everybody participating. Ezra and his colleagues did more than read the law. They taught it. They gave the sense, so that the people understood the reading.

The reading of the law is the sixth sign of renewal; it does not replace the other signs. If they had not built the wall and done the other things named, the importance of the law of God would not have commanded their minds. On the other hand, without the law of God there would have been no renewal at all, just a few achievements left to stand on their own merits. They would not stand for very long, because without the word of God people revert to their old habits and opinions. Without the word of God truly taught, anything can happen, and often does.

Even worse, nothing may happen—that is, nothing of substance or of lasting value. Apart from the word of God, what is it? Nothing but human achievement, human wisdom, human religion.

We still have the Law of the Lord today, but we have more; we have the Gospel. We have what St. Paul called the whole counsel of God. On that day by the water gate in Jerusalem they read the law because the law is what they had. Today we have the word of God from first to last, from the creation of the world, through the cross of Christ, to the final judgment at the end of the world. The lasting renewal of the church takes place in the light of this word and according to its truth.

Unless the sixth sign of renewal is evident, the other five other signs may get lost in directionless prayer, undisciplined emotion, sheer busyness, and in large numbers of people who are excited but uninformed.

As with so many passages of the Bible, this one furnishes us with a checklist if we want to mark it off. When we are dissatisfied with ourselves, or at how things are working in our family, job, church, and so on, we can always do this reality check:

· Have I given this to God in prayer in such a way that I am open to his answer?

· Have I put myself out in any way, or risked anything? Am I willing to? How much?

· Have I committed my labor to the cause?

· Have I committed my physical presence to it?

· And finally, am I committed to the word of God, that I will hear it, and believe it, and obey it, in this particular situation?

When a church is recovering from a slow time and a passive mood, these are signs of renewal. They are signs of life in a church that has been renewed.

` This has been a message about the sixth sign—people hearing, knowing, and obeying the word of God. Renewal is the work of God. The signs of renewal are the evidence that the work of God is doing some good! AMEN.