"A Hallelujah Life"
Part One
Sermon Transcript for December 29, 2002 By Rev. Mike Beck
Most of you know that life can truly change in a moment. For better or for worse, everything can change! When a person responds to a marriage proposal, when a child is born, when we start a new job, when a loved one dies, when an accident or serious illness strikes, and, yes, when we surrender our lives fully to God, life takes a dramatic change. When Ebenezer Scrooge went home from work on Christmas Eve he expected nothing different than any other night. For him, Christmas was just "a poor excuse to pick a man’s pocket" since he had to pay his employee, Bob Cratchit, for the holiday. But when Scrooge awakened on Christmas morning following what we might call his "holy hauntings", his life dramatically changed. He would never be the same. Let’s watch.
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Scrooge awakened with a joy and love for life that he absolutely could not contain. He immediately took the part of a "secret angel" and had the prize turkey delivered to the Cratchit’s for Christmas dinner. Then he sought out the gentlemen whose charitable request he had snubbed the evening before to make a generous contribution that stunned even them. He mustered up the courage to attend his nephew’s Christmas party, offering his apology and seeking full reconciliation with Fred and Fred’s wife, whom he had never even taken the time to meet. He was genuinely filled with the Christmas spirit. He had moved from "humbug to hallelujah"!
Dickens in his book, "A Christmas Carol" (and Jim Johnson told me this last week, kind of the rest of the story of that story), Charles Dickens needed money and wanted to write a book quickly to generate some cash. He started on "A Christmas Carol" in October and finished it before Christmas almost unaware of how divinely inspired he had been. He wrote it because he needed some quick cash; but it’s become a priceless treasure. But as we’ve used it in this series, let’s be careful to realize Dickens did not intend to teach Christian doctrine. When we speak of conversion from a Christian standpoint, it doesn’t come by our good works, it comes through faith in Christ. But as we look at Scrooge and his conversion, it gives us a picture of the fruit of conversion. In Scrooge we see that his actions are the evidence of a changed life. In Scrooge we see what it means to live out what we say we believe. Scrooge had said, "I will honor Christmas in my heart and I will try to keep it all the year." And then he makes this statement, "I will live in the past, the present, and the future. The Spirits of all three shall strive within me. I will not shut out the lessons they teach."
In this final message, we want to think about what Scrooge meant when he said he would live in the lessons of the past, the present, and the future. I was talking to Lisa Talley as we came in this morning and I said, "Lisa…" because she was hurrying, I said, "I sure am hoping when we get to heaven we don’t live life in such a hurry." And as I was putting this message together this week I realized there was far too much here to try and present it to you in one week. So that’s why we’re going to take two. All we’ll look at today is the past. The problem is that like New Year’s resolutions, the Christmas Spirit can quickly be forgotten as life returns to normal.
There is a true story from World War I that strikingly illustrates that truth. In those days warfare was not high tech. It was fought in the trenches in hand-to-hand conflict. On a cold, moonlit Christmas Eve, an Allied soldier recounted this story. Both the Allied and the German troops were huddled in their trenches in a field in northern France. The fighting had stopped because of the annual Christmas truce. And then from the British trench, a soldier broke in to singing the carol, "Silent Night". And then in the opposite trench, voices joined in singing the carol in German. Then the soldier recounts that early on Christmas day some of the British soldiers climbed out of their trenches in to no man’s land carrying a football. (Sidelight—I’m greatly appreciative of a person in this church who has given Dan and I tickets to the Colt’s game. It starts at 4:00 p.m. today so we get to go. The football that they’re going to play with this afternoon is not the same football the British would have carried out of the trenches. It would have been round.) And then some of the German soldiers climbed out and where bullets had flown just a day earlier, England played Germany at football on Christmas Day! And then the next morning, the carnage began again with machine guns and bayonet fighting replacing Christmas carols and football. Life was "back to normal". How do we keep from letting life go back to normal? How do we let the hallelujah of Christ’s birth touch every area of our life? All I can share with you today is the first point.
The Hallelujah Life Trusts God to Redeem the Past: As we saw in the first message, the past has tremendous power to shape our experience in the present. Some of you this morning are being held captive today to the wounds and mistakes of your past. There are three things you can do with the past.
First of all you can regret the past: The humbug life lives in the land of regret wallowing in the sadness of opportunities lost or mistakes made. It keeps the past alive in an unhealthy way by continually punishing one’s self with guilt and remorse, with fear and resentment. If you choose to live in the land of regret, it will become a dull ache and it will flare up on you at the most inconvenient times. When regret holds sway in your life, you rob not only yourself but you rob the people closest to you of the joy of the present moment. In the hallelujah life, the past is utilized to educate and train us. In a hallelujah life, the past exposes our need so we can find God’s grace. The events of the past, although hurtful, they expose our weakness so we can discover God’s strength. The past cannot make things better, but it can be the catalyst for us to seek better things. We can regret the past.
Forget the past: Some say it is simply better to forget the past. Those are the persons who choose to live in the land of the denial. But you watch them; they’ll try to numb the pain. They’ll say they’ve forgotten it, but they’ll try to numb the pain with alcohol, with drugs, with sex, with overwork, with constant activities. But they greatly underestimate the power of the past to influence the present. In the end, the dark forces of the past control them in ways they’re not even aware of. The hallelujah life, however, understands that denial is never an answer. The Bible teaches us that the truth alone sets us free. And God’s Word also teaches, "If we walk in the light of God, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus Christ cleanses us from all sin." Regret isn’t the answer; denial isn’t the answer.
We can let God Redeem Our Past By Faith: What we need to do with the past is the third option—to let God redeem it. The message of the angels to the shepherds was that a Savior had been born to set His people free. And many in Jesus’ day hoped that freedom would be from the tyranny of Roman rule. But the freedom Jesus came to bring was much greater than that. The Savior had come to set us free from our sin, to set us free from failure, to set us free from bitterness and fear. The freedom God came to bring could put us right with God and right with one another. God redeems the past through forgiveness. The Greek word for forgiveness means to wipe away, to erase, to obliterate.
I’ll bet there are a bunch of you who will remember this little gadget that I’m going to tell you about now. Mom made sure that all of us kids always had one in the car when we had a long drive to make. It was this little pad with a gray piece of paper on it and a special pencil that you could write on it but then once you had the page filled, you pulled it up, you heard this kind of scratchy sound, and all of the sudden the page was blank again. How many of you remember that? That’s what God wants to do with our mistakes of the past, with the hurts of the past. Heaven only knows we’ve filled up the whole page. And God says, "In Jesus Christ, he pulls up the page and it is clean."
I close with the story of a man named Tom Anderson. For years he had lived under the shadow of a bitter memory. He had participated in college in a hazing ceremony in his fraternity that resulted in the death of a fellow student. He floundered from one job to another. He and his wife separated after six years of marriage. But then one day, life made a u-turn for Tom Anderson. He and his wife got back together. He earned a fine position in the business world. And here was his explanation of what happened. Tom said, "For years I lived imprisoned by the terrible thing I had done. The thought of my guilt would stop me in the middle of a smile or a handshake. It put up a wall between my wife and me. But then one day I had an unexpected visit from the person I dreaded to see—the mother of the college classmate who had died. Here’s what she said, ‘Tom, years ago I found it in my heart, through prayer, to forgive you. So did your friends and your fellow employers.’ She paused, and then she said sternly, ‘Tom, you are the only person who hasn’t forgiven Tom Anderson. And just who do you think you are to stand out against me and everybody else and even the Lord Almighty whose forgiven you?’ Tom says, ‘I looked into her eyes and found there a kind of permission to be the person I might have been if the boy had lived. For the first time,’ Tom says, ‘I felt worthy to love and to be loved.’"
Friends, that’s what God wants to do with your past if you will let Him. And next week as we close out this series, we’ll look at what Christ wants to do with our present and the future. We can live a hallelujah life! Thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through Jesus Christ our Lord!
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