2024-10-13 Covenant CRC-sermon only - Joel Kok
One way our Sunday today is special is that our call to worship will come in the form of a poem. Here, I can share that this poem connected me to our scripture reading in all kinds of ways, especially through the word wisdom. So we'll be able to see that poem up front, and our worship leaders will read it to us. So, let's be ready to begin our worship by listening to this poem, which will help us hear the Word of God.
At the crossroads of decision
Wisdom calls to us all and each:
"Come, my children, learn and listen--
Heed the ways I seek to teach."
Conscious thoughts. or intuition.
Frame her words of grace and peace.
"Choose the pathway of the Lord."
On the ash heap of disaster
"Where is God?" we cry and weep.
Friends, our faults and faith uncertain;
Wisdom seems beyond our reach.
Still, she whispers from the whirlwind
Of our pain and of our grief:
"Trust the goodness of the Lord."
On a cross and in a manger,
God's compassion is made plain.
"Word made flesh is God among us."
" He is risen" brings hope for pain.
"Come you weary," pleads the Savior
Wisdom calls to us again:
" Cast your burdens on the Lord."
Well, we're continuing our series from the Epistle of James this week, and today we're going to begin at James 3, verse 13, and then we'll read into James 4 through verse 12. And as I mentioned, there's so much in this word. So, we hope to hear as much as we can hear in one setting. James 3 verse 13 begins on page 1883 in the Bibles in your chairs there.
And now, hear God's word. James, writing to people back in that day and also to us right now, he asks:
Who is wise and understanding among you? Let him show it by his good life, by deeds done in humility, that comes from wisdom. But if you harbor bitter envy and selfish ambition in your hearts, do not boast about it or deny the truth.
Such wisdom does not come down from heaven, but is earthly, unspiritual, of the devil. For where you have envy and selfish ambition, there you will find disorder and every evil practice. Amen. But the wisdom that comes from heaven is first of all pure, then peace-loving, considerate, submissive, full of mercy and good fruit, impartial and sincere, peacemakers who sow in peace, raise a harvest of righteousness.
What causes fights and quarrels among you? Don't they come from your desires that battle within you? You want something, but you don't get it. You kill and covet, but you cannot have what you want. You quarrel and fight. You do not have because you do not ask God. When you ask, you do not receive because you ask with wrong motives that you may spend what you get on your pleasures.
You adulterous people! Don't you know that friendship with the world is hatred toward God? Anyone who chooses to be a friend of the world becomes an enemy of God. Or do you think scripture says without reason that the spirit he caused to live in us envies intensely? But he gives us more grace. That is why scripture says God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble.
Submit yourselves then to God. Resist the devil and he will flee from you. Come near to God and he will draw near to you. Wash your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double minded. Grieve, mourn, and wail. Change your laughter to mourning and your joy to gloom. Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will lift you up.
Brothers, do not slander one another. Anyone who speaks against his brother or judges him speaks against the law and judges it. When you judged the law, you were not keeping it. But sitting in judgment on it, there is only one lawgiver and judge, the one who is able to save and destroy, but you. Who are you to judge your neighbor?
This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.
Well, friends, today, our Lord speaks to us as our judge, reminding us that none of us is the ultimate judge. Our Lord is the judge, and thank God when our Lord comes to us as the Judge. God comes to us as a judge who saves, and further, as part of God's judging salvation, God destroys what is evil.
So there are all kinds of things going on in this reading and all kinds of things going on in reality. The good news is that as our saving judge destroys evil so that he can make all things right in a whole new creation, as our Lord, the judge, carries out that kind of gracious salvation, God also transforms us.
He destroys the evil in us to make us the kind of people he wants us to be. God transforms us into co-workers who can work toward and, finally, in this new creation as his covenant partners, as people that we can even call ourselves friends of God. All of that flows from those final words, as God is our judge and all that led up to them.
And so, friends, to participate in that kind of salvation with such a Savior, a judge, who saves and makes us right and makes all things right, to participate in that kind of salvation with all that packed into these words in our reading, we're going to follow this morning what we can call a path and that path here is going to be a procedure in which we're going to listen to God's word and what we could call an outline or three points.
What we're going to do first, number one, is review the three stanzas in our call to worship because, with its word wisdom and other ways, it really connects to our reading. Then, we're going to explore two central words in our reading, and we're going to bring those words home by connecting each of them to a story related to the one story of salvation. And in point three, we will look at one message of reality, one message that comes to us through creation is that message through creation Is again going to help us hear all the words of God today and connect them to the stories of our life, which we want to connect to the story of God and Christ.
So, to begin the procedure we're calling a path to revisit those three points, we'll begin with point one, which is in the first stanza of the poem we heard earlier in our worship service we find the word crossroad—crossroad as in at the crossroad of decision Wisdom calls to all and to each. Now friends, as you can probably guess, wisdom is one of the two main words we will be looking at after we get through the three stanzas of the poem. So we'll spend more time on that word wisdom in a few minutes.
But to help us hear our Savior as a judge, that's the other major word, to help us hear our Savior as a judge, who gives us the wisdom we need, we're going to begin with that first stanza talking about how we come to a crossroad. And at a crossroad we need wisdom from our judge to help us follow the right path. And so, again, the poet calls this a crossroad of decision. And what that is implying is that as we journey through life, we come to a crossroad in which we're going through a very complicated time, and we can be going through a very conflicted time in which we're not sure where to go at the crossroad, which path to take.
At that time, we so need wisdom, which the poet says calls out to us to help us know where to go in relation to the crossroad. The gift of wisdom, then, is that wisdom helps us navigate the right path to take as we go through times of complications and conflicts. Wisdom helps us see which path is going to lead us toward the grace and peace that God wants us to have.
As the poem puts it, wisdom helps us here. Wisdom helps us choose the pathway of the Lord, which the poet rightly encourages us to seek by listening to the wisdom of God so that among all the different paths that are out there, wisdom can help us go down the pathway of the Lord. So that's the kind of thing that comes from the first stanza in the poem we heard earlier and is connected to our reading. It's about an experiential reality in which we need wisdom.
Again, there are experiences such as complications and conflicts. And then, there are further realities that come out in stanza two. In stanza two, we go into an even darker place because we read about a disaster there. That leads us into times of crying and weeping.
In stanza two, we read that we'll need this wisdom to help us trust amid the times of pain and grief, which come when disasters lead us to cry and weep. So again, that's the reality of our lives: we want the words of God, such as wisdom, to speak to and help us in times of pain and grief, where we need wisdom to help us keep going.
Then, we can mention one more gift from wisdom that comes out in stanza three. That gift is the Word of God, including words like wisdom and judge and all these things. That Word of God became flesh and came to us in a manger, which was a first step towards a cross. That's where the word of God goes, to a manger and a cross. And that reveals that in our darkest times, these words help us be alert to a Savior who has wisdom and a way of judging that can bring us through the hardest time. So, that's why I think it's good for us to keep thinking about those three stanzas in the poem because they can make us seek all the more the kinds of words—the kind of wisdom that we need from our Judge, who is also our Savior.
So, having briefly reviewed those three stanzas, let's turn to the two words. Again, the first word that we will focus on among the many words here is the biblical word wisdom. And here we're going to see that when God speaks to us through these biblical words like wisdom—we're going to get to judge in just a moment—God speaks those words the way he speaks all his words. That is, God is operating in ways that we'll never fully understand. God's words accomplish His purpose, which is a saving purpose for a whole new creation. And that's what the poem is helping us open our minds to: the words Wisdom and Judge to help us into that salvation from sin. The one story of God.
Now, the wonderful thing about the word wisdom, which we've already talked about a little bit, but just to emphasize why the word wisdom is such a gift, is because what it means is that when we're going through the hardest times in our lives when we're going through times when we're wondering, how can I keep going, I'm so weary? Or how can I love my enemy when I hate my enemy?When we're going through these times where we're really struggling, wisdom comes to us. God gives us wisdom, revealing to us that he knows He knows how hard it is to live out those words. And so he gives us what otherwise we'd be helpless without.
He gives us a wisdom that comes from above. Our translation says from heaven. It's a wisdom that's beyond any wisdom we could have on our own. It's a wisdom from above that our Lord brings down to us in our lowest times in order to lift us up into the life of God. that he wants for us. And once we hear that word wisdom coming to us in our complicated, almost seemingly impossible times of conflict, of fatigue, of hatred, all these things, Lord comes to us with wisdom.
And what does that wisdom do? Some more words come out. It leads us to purity, and there we can say, well, purity, what is that about? Well, it has to do with having a pure mind and thinking about God that leads to peace then. When we see wisdom leading to purity and peace so that we can follow Jesus, we see that James is echoing Jesus in a pretty specific way. When James talks about wisdom leading to purity and peace, James echoes Jesus, who reveals himself as a wisdom teacher in the Sermon on the Mount.
Towards the end, he says, if you live by my words, you're being wise; I'm a wisdom teacher. And as a wisdom teacher, Jesus speaks these beatitudes, these blessings that can surprise us. But in these cases, there's a blessing that James is echoing because remember what Jesus says in the Beatitudes? Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God. And so again, that's what James says. Wisdom makes us pure, so we want to see God, but when we're pure in heart, desiring to see God, blessed are we, because we will see God. Then, the next beatitude after “blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God” comes: “Blessed are the peacemakers for they shall be called sons and daughters of God.” When we see God and become like God, we can make the peace God wants for our world. And so all of these gospel truths flow from that word for peace and wisdom, leading to purity, peace, and to Jesus as a wisdom teacher.
There's so much in every word. The wisdom of God that James says leads to purity and peace. It also leads to humility. That's another key truth there. So, how are we going to get the wisdom that we need? Well, we need some humility to ask for it. And we need that humility to flow into how we relate to our fellow people and fellow creatures.
And here, to get a little bit of a way for these words and the word wisdom to come home to us in a way that leads to humility, purity, peace, and all kinds of other gifts, we'll try to get to a story. As I dealt with this passage, I found so much in every word and every sentence, and I was glad for the poem and some of the stories.
To see that wisdom from heaven above comes in a way that leads to all these further gifts, I remembered a story I read quite a few years ago from a writer named Francis Spooford. What happens here is that this man, Francis Spooford, testifies to a really low time in his life when, by our gracious God, he received wisdom from above that lifted him up in the path that God wanted for him. And so, what I can observe here is Francis Spuford's book is called Unapologetic. And then he gives it the subtitle—because he was moving in a place, he was in certain circles in England where many people mocked faith and just looked down on it, and he was a part of that for a while—He writes this book, Unapologetic, and gives it the subtitle: Why, Despite Everything, Christianity Can Still Make Surprising Emotional Sense. So he got surprised by how much sense and wisdom that God brought to him and he shared it with others.
In the poem, he describes a time when he was at a crossroads. He was at a crossroads because he was going through a time of bitter envy and selfish ambition, which led him into a disorder that made him more friendly to our fallen world than to God. That could have led him into complete disaster, but our gracious God gave him wisdom in what the poem calls a whisper.
So he experienced some of the things James talks about, and he can open us up to experiencing them, too. You see, in this time in which wisdom came to him in the form of a whisper, what was going on was his, you know, sort of unright way of living. Part of what was going on there was that his family life was falling apart, his faith life was almost completely lost, and he was wandering around just doing whatever he wanted. And then again, Jesus came to him with the saving power of wisdom And he experienced it first as kind of a whisper because when he realized what a low time he was at, when he was realizing the reality of which he was living with, he wound up in a way that he wasn't used to, he wound up going into a place of worship where it was silent and in that silence, wisdom whispered to him and just revealed to him that this loving, gracious God was still with him and coming to him. That led him to get better back onto a path that opened his mind to his Lord, giving him teachings about the right way to live as opposed to whatever he felt like doing.
He was opened to the teachings of the Lord. And he also became open to this shocking nature of our Lord because he wound up imagining seeing Jesus with a passion that he had never felt before. Again, he thought of Jesus as this wise teacher. But then what happens to the most wise teacher in the history of human life? He has to carry a cross, literally, and get tortured to death on a cross.
He saw his Lord coming to him through a manger and to a cross as the way to new life. That was wisdom whispering to him in a way that led him into humility. In that humility, he began to have the purity where he wanted to see God, which led him into the kind of peace in which he could reflect God to the people around him.
And what I think our Lord is saying to us through that story, which we can take kind of as a parable to bring out all the things that Jesus is saying through James today, is that our Lord can be whispering to us in all kinds of ways, in all kinds of times. And if we have the humility to sit in silence, if we have the humility to open our mind, then that wisdom can come from above and lead us again into purity, into peace, and to all those other situations or those virtues that we need in our struggles, our conflicts, our complications, and, again, to go back to stanza three, in our weariness.
So please know that if you're feeling weary today or if you're going through pain and sorrow, our Lord is whispering to you right now in the silence of your mind. He's speaking to you through these words with a saving purpose. And that saving purpose comes out in the second keyword that we're going to focus on for just a little bit, which is the word judge.
As in, God is the judge who saves and destroys what is evil. And I think the good news here is that when we get this realistic wisdom from God, when we think about a word like judge, at least in my case, an initial response is a little bit of fear. Oh, God judges me. But then the wisdom that comes in Christ says that it is good news that the Lord is our judge because the Lord who is our judge, he is also our savior.
So we've got this one lawgiver and judge who James says can save and destroy what needs to be destroyed. And so this wise teacher, Saviour Judge, is going to make everything right by destroying what is evil in order to make us into the people, the whole part of a new creation that he wants us to be.
And so let's just spend some time on that word judge. The Lord is coming to judge. And I just wonder, how do you respond initially to that word, judge? Here, I can share that I was really happy to read one time in C. S. Lewis's Reflections on the Psalms that he had always found the word, judge, a little bit frightening.
Until he was able to read the Psalms and say, "It's one thing to read about the psalmist celebrating God judging things in order to make all things right in all the human relationships with their conflicts and complications." The Psalms distinguish between that kind of judgment and the kind of judgment that would come if God were just looking at us and how we've related to Him, in which there is this guilt and sin.
And so to get that sort of a both-and thing about God as a judge who says, we could look, say, at Psalm 96 because Psalm 96 is one of several Psalms in which we get a celebration of Jesus Christ. Judgment because when we read Psalm 96 as it's looking for the king of the whole universe to come and judge the living and the dead, the whole world, what we get is this message that the heavens can be glad and the earth can rejoice, the psalmist says, because God's judgment is coming. He says let the sea roar and all that fills it. Let the field exult and everything in it because even the trees of the forest will sing for joy. What's bringing all that joy?
Because the Lord is coming to judge the earth, and the Lord is the kind of judge who destroys evil to make all things right. And so that's the Lord coming with righteousness, righteousness and faithfulness that includes the kind of grace and mercy that the psalmist knows well and that we need.
Because along with a psalm like Psalm 96 or 98 or several others celebrating a judgment that's making all things right and all the things going on in the world. There are these other Psalms that confess what many of us have emphasized, say Psalms 130 and 142, that say, Boy, Lord, if you just judged us according to whether we've lived up to your teachings, if you judged us, you would find sin and guilt.
Psalm 130, 142, they say, Lord, if you kept track of iniquities, not one of us could stand before you. And yet, because the Lord who is that judge who could condemn us, who wants to transform us into that rightness of making all things right in the Savior who is Jesus Christ. That's why that word, judge, becomes judge, a good news word for us, a word in which we need not feel fear. Because this judge comes to save, transform, and make all things right. And here, we can turn to Our World Belongs to God, this contemporary testimony from our denomination quite a few decades ago, but that still speaks to us in a helpful way.
There's so much more we could say about judgment in the Bible. So we'll just kind of have a summary perspective from Our World Belongs to God, which talks about how we, too, can join the psalmist in celebrating the day of judgment. Because what Our World Belongs to God says is that when we see our savior, when we see this judge face to face, when we see Jesus on judgment day, what are we going to see? We are going to see a sacrificed lamb who is also a triumphant king, and that means this sacrificed lamb comes with both grace and justice to make things right in just the wise way that actually works in a saving way. And then Our World Belongs to God goes on to say that this judge, Jesus, means we can look at Judgment Day without fear because this judge, what kind of a savior is he? He's a savior who poured out his own blood to make us righteous. Therefore, we can know and trust that this judge can weave through even our sins and sorrows for the sake of his saving purpose. That's how wise this saving judge is. And I think one way we can find this amazingly wise Savior coming to us in a way in which he'll be a judge who makes all things right, which won't include condemning us, which he could do, but destroying the evil in and among us.
What we can do is turn to one more story. So we did the Spooford story concerning wisdom. Let's do the judge story concerning a story I read a few years ago. And here, I'll confess, I could not find this story, so I can't remember every detail of it. But I do remember a central event in this true story, which, again, can be a sort of a parable about Jesus coming to us as a judge who's gonna bring a whole new, wonderful creation.
This is a sad story, as it begins anyway, with a woman who has suffered betrayal in her marriage. So she is suffering immensely. She is having the pain and the grief that we read about in the poem. She is just going through the darkest, lowest time in her life where she's wondering, can I trust God?
Where are you, God? Why am I going through all this pain? And what she winds up testifying is that as she was sort of wandering, almost stumbling along during that terrible, painful time, she went for a walk in which she was just sort of looking at the ground around her, and then she wound up. experiencing the glory of God in a way that she never would have predicted because she was looking at a very rocky place and in this rocky place there was this plant growing out in a way that she would have thought was impossible in a way that just seemed, how could that ever happen?
Well, we have this amazing creator who is always doing more in our creation than we can ask or imagine. And we can just share this very small thing Jesus talks about—a seed. His word is like a seed that can grow and become new life. That's what was happening here. This tiny plant spoke to this woman who didn't need so much to be humbled—she needed to be healed. Our Lord spoke to her through that plant in a way that made her open to the whole new creation that our Lord is bringing by destroying evil, but making us right. And so she was able to continue in her journey of following Jesus. She was able to be led through all that pain and grief, to sustain in her weariness toward that new creation, and that can lead us to this final message from creation, which is to say for all of us. We have some people here who really know a lot about creation through their study of physics and other sciences.
All of us, though, can realize that creation itself always has more happening in it than we will ever understand and we can take away a picture from it. For example, when we look at creation. In my case, I can look at the ocean and see waves, storms, and all kinds of things that I understand in part. But what I learned about 20 years ago when this terrible storm had killed a bunch of people in Thailand, what I learned is that there are streams underneath. At the depths of the ocean, they have strength and power that, again, I had never heard of. We can never see all that in many ways, but our Lord, the Creator, is working through all that.
And that is a signal. The Creator, who can make a plant grow through a rock, the Creator who can send amazingly strong streams at the depths of the ocean that we never see, that Creator, is also the new creation Savior who is always doing more than we can ask or imagine. And what that means is we can always trust this Lord to be at work with us for good, even when bad things are happening or more is happening than we can understand. What's going on ultimately there? The God who knows about the groaning of creation, as Paul says, that God is working with us in all things toward a new creation.
And when, having listened to the poem and the two words, wisdom, and judge, we're humbled by all that, to understand God's at work in ways that we can't understand but can trust. We can look at something like a flower. We can look at something like a stream. And we can know that God is doing so much more than we understand amid the storms that are both literal, climate storms and storms of battles.
Underneath and above us is this stream of the Holy Spirit flowing in a way that we can't understand but can trust. I would just pick and encourage you to take away one picture that I found helpful. That is, amid the storms at the top of the ocean, there is a powerful stream beneath, doing what we can't understand, but God is there.
Well, that's what our whole world is like. There are all kinds of storms going on. They're serious. We don't certainly deny them or anything, but then there is this deeper stream that is leading us into the whole new creation that our Father is making through His Son, Jesus Christ, and has flowed into our lives through the Holy Spirit.
So I hope that's a helpful picture. A deeper reality, a deeper stream, full of wisdom from above, from a judge, a deeper stream. who wants to save us. All of that is the kind of thing happening right now. That's God's saving purpose for his words today. And to hear that and live by that, let's join in prayer.
Gracious God, we thank you for a giving of wisdom from above that comes to us in the lowest times that we read about in the poem. And we thank you that this wisdom from above gives us an understanding of reality in which we can celebrate you as the judge who is our savior, who loves us enough to bring judgment on yourself by pouring out your blood.
We thank You for sending that glorious message in all kinds of ways through a creation that You're forming into a new creation. We thank You that we can see your glory in a flower, in every person next to us, and in all that you're doing. Thank you, Jesus, for saving us from the judgmentalism that can make us blind to your presence in the people around us.
Thank you that, as a judge, you relate to us as a savior who forms us into your covenant partners, people with whom we can see ourselves as your friends working with you towards this wonderful glory that you have revealed. We thank you for this. We pray for all this in your name, Lord Jesus. Amen.