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June 10, 2007
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Willa's Birthday Sunday
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Pastor Brian Shimer
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"BOAST IN THE LORD"
1 Corinthians 1: 18-31
- One day Willa Hayes told me that she had attended a worship service recently and there they had sung a few hymns, served communion and dismissed the group, "But Brian," she told me, "no one read or preached the Word! There was no sermon! I came home and did not feel like I had really worshiped."
On that day I was also thinking about this time of worship we would have and knew that for Willa to truly be honored today, we would need to turn to the Word and to the Lord Jesus, for what is worship without Jesus or the Word?
Besides, Willa does not want to be idolized. She knows that anything good that has happened through her life, anything of value, anything of excellence, anything that is gold or silver or of precious stone quality, has happened not because she is something great but because her God is Someone great and has chosen to work through her.
Willa would be the first to tell you that she has not done all things well. She has made the decisions that she felt were the best at the time but like all of us has 20/20 vision in hindsight and would have made different decisions at times could she make them over again. But at the time, she did the best she could with the options she knew she had.
This is what we all do. We do not all make the best decisions along the way of life and sometimes look back and wish we could take back a word said a deed done, but cannot do so without the assistance of Jesus.
Herein is where Willa did the best thing we could do and something we need to continue to do: she trusted Jesus. For with all the things we wish we could undo or redo, there is only One in this universe who can help that happen in our lives and this is Jesus. Willa has sought to trust and serve Jesus day by day in her life. In these last years she has been working hard to allow Jesus to humble her through the various hardships and help her still more fully rest in His care during this season.
As she has had to move from her beloved home to Jennings McCall, she has encountered what she has said is the hardest thing she has had to do in her life. Every time we have spoken together, I have encouraged her to trust Jesus even here, and to rest in the place to which He has brought her. I told her it is like the Israelites on their journey to the Promised Land who after days came to Elim with 72 Palm Trees and the 12 springs. So, I have told her, "God has you in Elim, Willa, prior to your entrance into the Promised Land."
One thing that we all share with our sister Willa Hayes is the journey of life - we are all on a pathway and God invites us onto The Way to walk with Him, to walk based upon what He has accomplished for us, to walk trusting Him day by day. This is seldom easy and all of us tend to fall into the difficulties that are expressed throughout Scripture either in the lives of those Israelites who journeyed to Elim or in the lives of those Christians who lived at Corinth to whom Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians.
- In a phrase Paul's point in this passage is what he ends with, to "boast in the Lord". Now, what the people in the town of Corinth were boasting in was their leaders - they were divided into camps one saying, "I am a follower of Paul" another saying, "Well, I follow Apollos" and a third, "I follow Peter," and another, the purest of them all, saying, "I follow Christ."
Our modern denominations look like this when we believe for a minute that we have the corner on the market in God's kingdom. We can become ugly, prideful bastions of evil rather than neighborhoods in the Kingdom of God like we are meant to be!
This boasting was an expression of the arrogance that we are liable to encounter in our hearts. It is the boasting that begins to believe you have all you need in yourself. It is boasting which the Prophet Jeremiah wrote of in the passage from which Paul borrowed the thought about boasting in the Lord when he wrote: "Let not the wise man boast of his wisdom or the strong man boast of his strength or the rich man boast of his riches," and why not? Because their wisdom, strength and wealth are nothing in comparison with the greatness of God. Then God said, "But let him who boasts boast about this: that he understands and knows me, that I am the LORD, YAHWEH, who exercises kindness, justice and righteousness on the earth, for in these I delight," Declares the Lord (9:23-24).
In instructing the Corinthians Paul uplifts the action of God in Jesus Christ on the cross saying that for those who are being saved this cross is the power of God. The cross expresses the wisdom of God over against the wisdom of this world. God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself, Paul will later write to these Corinthians, inviting them to lay down their divisions and uplift their hands in praise to the God who called them out of darkness into His marvelous light.
Paul says they have nothing to boast about anyway, for it is not of them that they were where they are, but of God. It is God who chose them. He chose them who were foolish in the eyes of the world and weak and lowly and despised and like nothing. Because God did this, "no one may boast before God."
It is because of the action of Yahweh the you know Jesus at all, that you are IN CHRIST at all, not because of any wisdom or strength or power or might in you.
It is in Jesus that our unity is found. Every denomination that is a living entity, that has Jesus central to the faith preached is equally a part of the church.
In Jesus that we enter God's righteousness on our behalf, we cannot and do not need to "make ourselves look right" it is God who makes us right. And it is Jesus who is our holiness - in Him we are set apart as holy to God, so holiness becomes the work of God upon our hearts, it is something established by God; and mostly, Jesus is our redemption, He left heaven to buy us back by the sacrifice of his own life that we could enter into the life offered by God.
This is the power of the cross to change us unchangeable people into men and women who reflect the excellence of their Savior.
Today we are here to boast in the Lord who took Willa as she sought to commit herself to her savior and follow Him in her life and saw fit to use her in many, many lives. We boast in the greatness of the God who could use her as a wife, mother, teacher, friend and leader in the church to assist many people to discover the beauty of Jesus. We boast in what God can do. Willa will tell you it is not because she is anything great, but because her God is a great God that she is here today to celebrate this 100th birthday. So as we share the high points, the moments of blessing and encouragement, let us continually think on this wonderful passage of Scripture and ponder how Great God must be to use any life and in today's instant Willa's life to touch so many people.
Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord.
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