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Who We Are - Sermon, December 7, 2003 "Second Sunday in Advent"
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ZEPHANIAH 3:14-17 as follows —
"Sing, O Daughter of Zion; shout aloud, O Israel! Be glad and rejoice with all your heart, O Daughter of Jerusalem! The LORD has taken away your punishment, he has turned back your enemy. The LORD, the King of Israel, is with you; never again will you fear any harm. On that day they will say to Jerusalem, "Do not fear, O Zion; do not let your hands hang limp. The LORD your God is with you, he is mighty to save. He will take great delight in you, he will be silent in his love, he will rejoice over you with singing."
How frustrating it can be to have your travel plans disrupted. Say you have a seat booked on a flight to Seattle, where you have to make a tight connection in order to get to Denver in time for a big emergency business meeting. But you get to the airport and find out that your flight has been cancelled, and there isn't another one for three hours. Frustrated would be the word for it, eh?
How disappointing it would be if your vacation plans were ruined! Say your parents are taking you to Disneyland for a week, or maybe you have a two-week reservation at your favorite resort in nice warm place. But two days before you leave, you get a phone call informing you that something got messed up and your reservation has been cancelled; there's nothing available for you, not a single room anywhere. Disappointed hardly begins to describe how you'd feel!
Travel plans disrupted, reservations cancelled — such things are usually not a recipe for joy. But there is one cancelled reservation about which we can be very happy indeed, happy, relieved and eternally thankful. There is one destination where we are not going to end up, thanks to the grace of our living and loving God. As full-fledged members of this sinful human race, our destination was destruction and our reservation was in hell, but as the Word of the Lord through Zephaniah reassures us, we have every reason to SING AND SHOUT AND BE GLAD AND REJOICE! You see, that reservation we had in a VERY warm place has been cancelled for good.
Zephaniah was called by the LORD to speak to the people of Judah, just a few years before Jerusalem was crushed by Babylon. He was sent to announce the day of the LORD, that day when God's wrath would be unleashed in judgment on all who do evil. His words are timeless. Some of what he said was specific to the people of his day, but much of his message does not have a date stamped on it. It is just as true and applicable now as it was 26 centuries ago. He invites us to sing and shout and be glad and rejoice, but we will only appreciate that invitation if we first of all personally wrestle with and grasp his message about judgment. "The day of the LORD is coming," the prophet said, and "that day will be a day of wrath." On that day, God's totally correct and one hundred percent justified anger will be let loose.
God will pass judgment, he promises, on all who are guilty of idolatry. In those days, that meant not only the pagan nations outside of Judah, but also the people of Judah who had gotten sucked into the worship of idols — Baal-berith and Baal-Peor and Baalzebub, and Asherah, the sex goddess, and the stars which they worshiped on their rooftops, and Molech, the "god" to whom they sacrificed their babies. God will pass judgment also, he guarantees, on those who try to straddle the fence, spiritually. In those days, that meant the people of Judah who one minute would take part in worshiping the LORD (outwardly, at least) and then, the next minute, turn around and bow down to idols. They were people who were comfortable mixing lies with God's truth. Finally, God will also pass judgment, he says, on all who are indifferent, on those in Judah who just don't care, who have turned away from the LORD and pay no attention to him or his Word any more.
Anyone who fits into one of those categories has a one-way ticket away from God's presence and a guaranteed reservation in hell. Now, again, this Word of the LORD is timeless; it is true today as well. I don't know anyone, personally, who bows down to Baal or worships the sun, moon and stars, but that doesn't mean there's no idolatry in our world. Consider how Paul defined idolatry in Romans 1: "They exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator."
That Creator demands that all people love him above all things (because he is God!) and trust him above all things (because he is God!). That means that there are plenty of idolaters out there in this evil world — but there's also one standing right here in front of you. How many moments have there been in my life, do you think, when I loved created things, was devoted to created things more than to the Creator? How many times when I trusted created things more than I trusted the Creator?
That Creator, the LORD God of heaven and earth, also rightly expects that all people fear him, that we honor him and respect his Word and worship him above all else. But how often have we been content to give him only shared time in our hearts, maybe a bit like those in Judah who straddled the fence? who accepted lies along with the truth? who thought they could live with one foot in God's kingdom and the other firmly planted in the world?
And how many times in our lives have we resembled those who were indifferent toward the LORD? Maybe they didn't all of a sudden reject God; they just gradually lost interest in him and his Word, and the LORD became irrelevant in their daily lives. In Revelation, Jesus, as Lord of the Church, speaks to indifferent "Christians" and says, "I know your deeds, that you are neither cold nor hot. I wish you were either one or the other! So, because you are lukewarm —neither hot nor cold — I am about to spit you out of my mouth."
Oh, I have been indifferent! And yes, I have committed idolatry; I have not feared, loved and trusted God above all things. Yes, I deserve his righteous anger; my sins are awful enough to earn me a one-way ticket away from God's presence. And I — like every one of you — had a guaranteed reservation in hell. If we grasp the full truth of that, dear Christians, we can then appreciate Zephaniah's invitation to sing and shout and be glad and rejoice!
The reason for rejoicing is this: "The LORD has taken away your punishment." You and I know how God removed our punishment; as Isaiah put it, "He was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was upon him, and by his wounds we are healed... the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all." You know who the "he" is in that prophetic Word. It's Jesus, the Son of God, born of Mary in Bethlehem, the One who took our place under the wrath of God and took our punishment away. Through his life and suffering and death and empty grave, God has cancelled our reservation in hell!
There's the reason why we should sing, shout, be glad and rejoice. Listen, the prophet says: "The LORD your God is with you, he is mighty to save." There's an echo of another prophecy of Isaiah, the one about the Son to be born of a virgin, Immanuel, God with us, the God who stooped down from heaven to be with us and save us. And note, dear friends, how that saving action and presence of God takes away our fears: "Never again will you fear any harm." What could possibly do any real damage to those whom God has saved for himself? Ah, but we do tend to be fearful. We tend to be anxious. We do tend to worry so much about so many things. But it sounds like our God wants to fill us so full of the joy of salvation that there won't be any room for fear.
He says, "Do not fear; do not let your hands hang limp." Fear does that to people, you know. Fear paralyzes. Fear freezes. Fear prevents action. It makes people afraid of decisions, of challenges, of changes. Fearful people hesitate. Fearful people draw back. Fearful people "let their hands hang limp." They keep their hands in their pockets, their mouths shut, their bottoms in their easy chairs, their money in their wallets and their heads in the sand. How sad it is if we, God's victorious saints in Christ, live our lives anxious and afraid!
No, the LORD says, don't let your hands hand limp. Get up and get on with it fearlessly. Get on with it in your personal sanctification — fearlessly living a truly godly life more and more each day. Get on with it in your mission zeal, as you fearlessly do whatever you can see that many more sinners hear that their reservation in hell has been cancelled. This is quite the opposite of indifference — not being lukewarm but on fire, zealous for the Lord and his Word and his will.
When we do fearlessly get on with it, in gratitude to God and love for our Savior, note what will happen, as the prophet describes the LORD's response. "He will take great delight in you; he will be silent in his love; he will rejoice over you with singing." Isn't that an eye-popping thing to hear, that God will be delighted because of us? Describing the LORD in human terms, the prophet tells us that sometimes he's silent, just overcome by his pleasure. Other times he busts out singing for joy because of what his grace is doing in us (what do you think it sounds like when God sings?).
To me, that's just amazing, but then, that's why he went so far to reclaim us. That's why he came down from heaven and was born in a stable and died on a cross. The writer to the Hebrews said of Jesus, "for the joy that was set before him, he endured the cross." God wanted to lavish his love on us, because he wanted to redeem us from sin, cancel our reservation in hell, give us a one-way ticket to glory — that's what makes God happy! And then, when he sees our love for him, when he sees his grace transforming our lives, when he sees us living in fearless devotion to him, it makes him happier still. That's hard to imagine, but isn't it all the more reason for us to do what Zephaniah invites us to do? Sing and shout and be glad and rejoice! Amen.