"Our New Year's Resolutions"
Sermon Transcript for January 18, 2004
Scripture Reading: Leviticus 25
By Rev. Dan Sinkhorn
In the next few weeks I’m going to be studying God’s Word and what it says to us about our New Year’s resolutions. I can almost hear some of you groan when I said that. How many of you have made New Year’s resolutions just a few weeks ago? Go ahead and raise your hand if you have. It’s all right—be honest in church! I saw somebody do this. But there were others, I promise. How many of you have all ready broken some of those New Year’s resolutions? Go ahead, it’s church. Yeah, me too! Now here’s the question where you’re going to have to really be honest. How many of you have given up on New Year’s resolutions all together? Go ahead and raise your hands. Uh-huh, that’s what I thought. You know, I like New Year’s Eve and I like New Year’s Day. I continue to use New Year’s Eve as a time to review the year that has passed and to think about the things that have happened in my life and what I would like to see changed and different. And I use New Year’s Day as a way of saying, “Here’s a fresh start, Dan. Here’s a chance to start again.” When my children have had a bad day, as I kiss them goodnight, a lot of times I will say, “Tomorrow is a new day.”
I like new beginnings. And I believe our God is a God of new beginnings. And one great story from scripture tells us that. Listen to these words excerpted from different places in the 25th chapter of Leviticus. “The Lord said to Moses on Mt. Sinai, ‘Count off seven Sabbaths of years, seven times seven years, so that the seven Sabbaths of years amount to a period of forty-nine years. Then have the trumpet sounded everywhere on the tenth day of the seventh month on the Day of Atonement. Sound the trumpet throughout your land. Consecrate the fiftieth year and proclaim liberty throughout the land to all of its inhabitants. It shall be a jubilee for you.” And speaking of the people who may have been in debt, who may have been in some way enslaved to another person, God says, “Even if he is not redeemed in any of these ways from his debts, he and his children are to be released in the Year of Jubilee. For the Israelites belong to me as servants. They are my servants whom I brought out of Egypt and I am the Lord your God.”
(Roger Smith sings the following song “Jubilee” which was written by Michael Card)
The Lord provided for a time
For the saints to be set free
For the debt to all be cancelled
So His chosen ones could see.
His deep desire was for forgiveness
He longed to see their liberty
And His yearning was embodied
In the Year of Jubilee.
Jubilee, Jubilee
Jesus is our Jubilee
Debts forgiven
Slaves set free
Jesus is our Jubilee
At the Lord’s appointed time
His deep desire became a man
The heart of all true jubilation
And with joy we understand.
In His voice we hear a trumpet sound
That tells us we are free
He is the incarnation
Of the Year of Jubilee
Jubilee, Jubilee
Jesus is our Jubilee
Debts forgiven
Slaves set free
Jesus is our Jubilee
To be so completely guilty
Given over to despair
To look in to your judges face
And see your Savior there
Jubilee, Jubilee
Jesus is our Jubilee
Debts forgiven
Slaves set free
Jesus is our Jubilee
Jubilee, Jubilee
Jesus is our Jubilee
Debts forgiven
Slaves set free
Jesus is our Jubilee
Debts forgiven
Slaves set free
Jesus is …Jesus is our Jubilee
Thank you, Roger. There’s an important message there for all of us. That there is a Year of Jubilee, there is a time of jubilee in all of our lives. We just need to get hold of it. We need to be tuned in to the sound of God’s trumpet blast. Now the truth is, all of you who agreed with me that New Year’s resolutions were getting to be a little ridiculous, all still love a new beginning, don’t you? Everyone loves the chance to start again. The problem is that after awhile you begin to become a little jaded. You begin to realize that our nature is to blow it. And so when we take on new resolutions and we try to begin fresh we are skeptical about our own nature. And I want to submit to you today that that is the very part of the whole human story. Listen to this reminder to us from the Book of Genesis--the story of the very beginning of humanity. And God said, “Let us make man in our image, in our likeness. And let him rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth and over all creatures that are moving along the ground. So God created man in His own image. In the image of God He created him, male and female he created them. And God saw then what He had made and it was very good. Then the Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it. And the Lord God commanded the man,” and here’s the beginning of the end, “you are free to eat from any tree in the garden, but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. For when you eat of it you will surely die.’ Now, if you’re like me you are probably thinking when you hear that story, there’s where the problem starts. Everything’s fine. There is a new beginning. Everything is going to be just fine but then temptation is placed in front of you. And it’s just a matter of time before the thing that you are told you cannot have becomes too enticing, and so you take it.
And you might ask yourself the question that I would ask and that is, “Why would God even put the tree of knowledge of good and evil in the garden in the first place?” But remember those words at the beginning of the passage we read where it says that God said let us make man and women in our image? No other creature that God put on the earth has the choices and the freedom of will that we have. When you go to the zoo or the pet store, you see very intelligent animals. But when it is all said and done, they are doing what their instinct tells them to do. And it is the same over and over again. But with us it is different. God made us in His image and He says we are free to choose and make the kind of decisions that God makes. Let me just take a side here for a moment and remind you that if I should happen to refer to God as He or Him or His, I am not assigning gender to God it is just a convenience of language so please bear with me on that.
Well, Adam and Eve blew it, didn’t they? And so God cast them out of the Garden and in to the wilderness. Now a lot of people would say that God must have thrown them out and He stayed in. But that’s not what happened at all. The fact is that God was with them outside the garden as well, that God did not cast them from the garden and abandon them. And I would even say that God, like a loving parent, was punishing them simply because He knew that if they didn’t understand the consequences of the decisions they made they would not mature and be more like Him. So he took away from them the bliss that was the Garden of Eden and He sent them in to the wilderness. Not only as punishment but also as a place of refinement, a place where they would trim the fat, a place where they would become stronger and they would learn to be like Him to learn God’s plan of salvation.
It’s written all over the Bible, you know--people in the wilderness. Michael Card, the author of the song you just heard, says this about the wilderness: “Every significant event in the history of salvation happens in the wilderness. In its own way it is a more blessed place than the Promise Land.” And I would add, “or the Garden of Eden”. God takes us into the wilderness probably at first because we need a little fine-tuning. We need a little correction. But in the wilderness God sees promise in us and makes us more than we thought we could be. In the wilderness God shows us his faithfulness, his abiding presence, and his ability to mold us and shape us. Look at some Biblical examples here in the history of humanity.
The first example I think of is Noah. You can read his story in the Book of Genesis, in the Chapters from 7 to 10. Oh, what a guy Noah is! You know that after a time all the generations that followed Adam and Eve became very corrupt. In fact they became so decadent and ugly that God didn’t even want anything to do with them any more. And he was about ready to wipe it all out, but he saw one person with promise. And it was Noah. And this one person that he saw promise in was going to be the source of salvation. But don’t get me wrong. Let me say this. It is very clear from the stories of Noah that he was anything but perfect. Noah definitely had issues. But there was some glimmer of promise in him. There was something in Noah that set him apart from the rest. And so God sent him in to the wilderness first by asking Noah to build a boat in the middle of the dessert. Now don’t think that wasn’t a wilderness experience. It must have cost him a lot in his wealth and I imagine it cost him a lot in prestige and people in his community must have really enjoyed coming out making fun of the weird man who was making a boat in the middle of the dessert because a great flood was coming. That was a wilderness experience. It definitely shaped his character. And then he went through the wilderness experience of the great flood. He closes his family and all the creatures that he spared into this box, seals it shut. He listens to the cries and pleas for mercy of his friends who are dying. And then he is cast adrift in what was the most amazing and terrible calamity the world has known yet. He’s in a box in the dark surrounded by seasick animals--that’s a wilderness experience! He doesn’t know where he’s going to end up but he knows that the God of promise is there. And so he floats waiting. He eventually lands somewhere, the water subsides and he’s in the wilderness again. But it’s the wilderness of promise where the new beginnings occur.
We move then to his descendent, Abram. Abram was a well-to-do guy. Had plenty of things going his way. He didn’t need anything. He was quite comfortable. And I guess what happened again was that people got a little too distant from God. They were beginning to see the gods as forces to be appeased and at best just totally distant. It’s better if the gods just leave them alone. But Abram, he believed in a God that was real and present and interested in human history. Interested in Abram even. He was different. He was a person in whom God saw some promise. Now, he also needed a little refinement and improvement. And so God calls Abram into the wilderness. He tells Abram to take his stuff, his family, everything he has and head out into the wilderness to a place that hasn’t yet been disclosed. And you know what? Same as Noah, his friends, his family they are all saying, “You know, I think you are a kook!” But he does it anyway. Abram goes into the wilderness. He endures all sorts of tests and trials in the wilderness. But through Abram we get the first sign, the first really vivid glimpse of how God will save all of humanity. He becomes known as Abraham and he becomes the father of generations. And oh yeah, did I mention that all of these promises that he believed in were built around generations after him and yet his wife was barren and there was no sign in their old age that a child would come? The child they would name “Laughter” because it was such an unbelievable thing that God would give an old lady and an old man a baby they’ve been wanting all their lives. And that baby would be the beginning of generations of believers.
Because of Abram’s willingness to endure the wilderness, a descendent of his by the name of Joseph came along. Now Joseph was a nice kid but he was spoiled rotten. He was his daddy’s favorite kid. And well he was a little full of himself and his brothers resented that. And he had a bad habit of shooting his mouth off at all the wrong times and irritating his brothers. And I guess he did that because he just thought he was entitled to all the wonderful things he had. He was perhaps a little too comfortable. But God must have seen some promise in him because when Joseph had shot his mouth off one too many times to his brothers, they threw him in a hole in the ground and left him for dead. And then they felt guilty about it so they improved his situation, so to speak, by selling him into slavery to the Egyptians. Joseph spent decades and decades in the wilderness of slavery not knowing from day to day whether he would be spared, not knowing from day to day what his future would hold. And in that process of going from comfort and prosperity to the wilderness, God transformed Joseph into the salvation of the nation of Israel. Because one day God raised Joseph to the second most powerful position in the world as they knew it in that day. And through Joseph He spared the people that He had called chosen.
Those people lived in Egypt for a number of years in great comfort. And I suspect that once again they got comfortable. They got use to the way things were in Egypt. And so they spent a little too much time practicing Egyptian lifestyles. And the God who had been interested in them in such a personal way became distant again. Not by God’s choice, but by theirs. So they were cast into the wilderness of slavery in Egypt. A whole people this time! And in that wilderness they were shaped and transformed so that one day they realized that they needed the Lord, the God of their fathers. And they pleaded with that God, the one true God, for mercy and salvation.
And it was sent to them through a man named Moses. Moses first defeated all those false gods that they had become accustomed to in their comfort. With God’s power, each of them was put in their proper perspective. And the great one true God of their fathers led them from slavery toward the Promised Land. But you know the story there. You’re more familiar with that one than any, I’m sure. They got into the journey to the Promised Land and they blew it. They shot off their mouths, they got too comfortable, and they wanted to go back to Egypt. But God loved them too much to let them go backward. He kept moving them forward to a new beginning so He cast them into the wilderness too and let them wander in the wilderness where they were shaped and formed. Where all those awful, nasty habits gradually fell away and we become stronger. Have you ever seen that movie about the guy who’s lost on a desert island--the Tom Hanks movie? He started out fat, comfortable. He ended up lean, strong, self-reliant, and aware of what mattered most. That’s what the wilderness did for the people of Israel. That’s what the wilderness can do for us.
The last example I want to give you of a wilderness experience today is Jesus. Did you know that Jesus, right before He began His earthly ministry, was cast into the wilderness? He was called in to the wilderness by the Spirit. And in the wilderness Jesus suffered too all of those refining events that occur when you wander in the wilderness. He was tested there and tempted just as we are tempted. But because He did not succumb to the temptation He proved His Sonship--His worthiness to preach God’s word, to raise the dead, to heal the sick, His worthiness to die for our sake on the cross, His worthiness to rise from the dead and to ascend to the right hand of the Father.
God still leads us into the wilderness today. And I know that many of you are in the wilderness right now. And a lot of times when we wander in the wilderness, we get tempted to go backward don’t we? There’s a temptation to give up on our new resolutions, to give up on our new ambitions. To give up on the promise that’s just over the horizon and to go back to the place that’s familiar. As a pastor I have the opportunity to hear a lot of peoples troubles and I find that there is a lot of dysfunction out there. The interesting thing that I have noticed about dysfunctional situations is that there is a kind of strange comfort in them. There are people who are terribly unhappy, they are miserable, because of their situation, but when they think about what it will take to improve their situation, they prefer to stay in their miserable condition because “At least I know my way around this place of misery and if I go into the wilderness I’m going to be lost. And I don’t’ know if I can handle that.” But God calls you into the wilderness to take the attention off of the “I” and to put the attention on Him. God calls you in the wilderness because that’s the place where He shows you what you are capable of and what you can become with His help. Maybe we need to get a hold of God’s plan for our salvation if we are going to be survivors in the wilderness and victors in the Promised Land.
Now looking at that story from Leviticus again, I notice that God created this fifty-year cycle where He just, right in the middle of everything, disrupts the routine and declares jubilee. And I think that maybe the reason God does that is because He knows our nature better than we do. And He knows that if we start doing the same thing the same way for too long, we’ll get comfortable and then we’re just this close to worshiping the wrong Gods, this close to getting fat and lazy and not needing our Lord. So on that fiftieth year the trumpet blasts and all those who have become very comfortable have to cancel the debts; they have to free the slaves; they have to start over. God is a God of new beginnings. And if you didn’t make a new year’s resolution this year, that is okay. You don’t have to wait until next year. Your new beginning could start today. Every time the sun rises there is a new beginning. Every time we ask God to forgive us for our sins, to help us to press on towards His promise there is a new beginning.
But be careful because when God delivers you from one of your wilderness trials, you are at risk of falling in to the same temptation that happened to the Israelites. It’s recorded in the Book of Numbers as the Israelites are traveling toward the promise; they begin to grumble again and complain and began to plead with Moses to take them backward to the place of Egypt. And so God allows serpents to attack the community. And I don’t know of anything that would be more terrifying than that. And so they pleaded for mercy again, and they realized that it was the Lord their God that they needed to depend on and they had forgotten again. So God gave Moses the instruction to take a symbol of their suffering and raise it up on a pole and hold it up over their heads. And that symbol was a bronze snake. And if they would just look to that pole and remember that God could deliver them, they would not be killed by the poison and they would not be bitten. And so it was. But the problem after that was that time passed and they became comfortable with the idea that when God seemed distant, Moses had that pole over there in his tent and they could get that out and look at it and they would be okay again.
Now is it possible that the things that make us feel good when we are in trouble, the things that make us feel better when we are in trouble become false gods to us? Is it possible that when we are wandering the wilderness being shaped and defined that God is asking us to be careful, to recognize that all good comes from Him and that there are symbols and signs of his faithfulness and his abiding presence all around us but they are only symbols and signs? I have noticed the world that we live in has embraced Christianity in a peculiar way and it troubles me. There is a kind of Christianity now a day that I call pop Christianity; and it’s just another part of the pop culture. And it is a dangerous temptation to drift away from the truth into this pop Christianity that has been twisted and turned by our interpretation and by the pop culture’s interpretation.
What, my friends, is your snake on a pole? Be careful. The way to recognize that you are witnessing pop Christianity is real simple. As I have described these various stories throughout the Old Testament, you have no doubt heard that God is consistent, that God does it the same way every time. He works the same way. God is never changing; He is always the same. It is why He told Moses, “I am is the one who sent you.” If you are tempted toward something that doesn’t feel right, just compare it to what you know that is true about our God. And then dismiss Him if He looks too much like an idol.
God’s plan for us always includes our redemption. The honest truth about our bad habits and the things we want to change is that they are sins. And what is sin but simply those things that separate us from a personal relationship with God. And God allowed His own Son to come and live like us, to endure the very temptation that we endure, and the sufferings in the wilderness that we suffer. And His Son proved that it could be done. That you can make it! (Lost some of transcription due to changing sides on tape) So that He can mold you and shape you over the years into the person that He wants you to be so that you can be a part of His glorious plan of redemption for the world. I believe that God did that for me in my life and someday I’d love to share the story with you. But I can tell you that I did my wilderness time, and I’ll do it again. It will come again. But it was worth it. It was worth it. So please hold on because your day of jubilee is coming. Your time of experiencing that renewal and new beginning is on the way. Just listen for that trumpet blast.
E-mail Comments to: Reverend Dan Sinkhorn