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November 14, 2004
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Hebrews
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Pastor Brian Shimer
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"No. Coke Isn't the Real Thing"
Hebrews 8-9
- When I was with our dear sister Jacque Duncan this past week as she lay in bed miserable awaiting verdict of what to do to get some healing,
we read a passage from the Psalms together. As I read it was as if the heavenly Father was taking a cool cloth to soothe the soul of his daughter. She relaxed. Peace flooded her. I was struck with how powerful faith is when encountering a crisis. Here she was facing the unknown, but she was doing it without fear and in confidence in God's grace and mercy. When I was with her again this morning before surgery, I encountered the same faith. She held my hand and said, "I know God is going to take care of me. He is right here with me." Indeed he was, so we prayed.
Why does she view what is up ahead without fear? Because she has faith, and such faith is the real thing, true relationship with Jesus.
Earlier this week I had the opportunity to eat breakfast with another sister, a fellow pastor Phyllis Stelson, who had cancer once a couple years back. At that time she was undergoing surgery and treatments during annual Conference at which she was to receive her elder's ordination. So, the bishop made a special point of traveling down to the local church she pastors outside of Roseburg and having a service of ordination there when she was well.
She has been well for these years since that treatment, and now the doctors have discovered new cells which they fear are symptoms of pancreatic cancer. She was in Portland undergoing tests. But when I met with her and her daughter we had a delightful time. Is she mournful and fearful, hardly, she is full of joy and life. God is good, and life is good.
She compared herself and Becky to the characters from the old show the Beverly Hillbillies, with Phyllis being Grannie Ellie Mae Clampert. Both of them were big eyed at the wonders of the big city Portland. It was Phyllis who made this comparison of them. They were seeing the sights when the Cat scan sessions were over, going shopping, eating out and living high on the city. They were having a great time. They did not even tell the hostess at the hotel that they were in town for this search for cancer cells, why depress her? They were living honestly in the face of the crisis by faith, and a real relationship with Jesus is the "real thing" that God wants for us.
- I hear the truth of the Gospel in those experiences. For in the Gospel, God reaches down to my level and yours to lift from death to life, from despair to hope. God gives us the real thing: relationship not just religion.
We are great at religion, but religion is not salvation.
This was one of the problems the Jewish people had with the Old Covenant they erroneously did the works instead of believing the promise. God says he found "fault" in the people, they did not want the forgiveness He offered, nor did they want to be His covenant people and a light for the Gentiles.
So, God inaugurated a new covenant and made the first covenant obsolete.
Whereas in the old covenant he had written his law onto stone and put it into the box of the covenant, in the Holy of Holies, separated from the people, in this New Covenant he would write it upon the hearts of people and put it into their minds. The words hearts and minds relate to the inner life of the people. This new covenant is an intimate and personal one.
As chapter nine details, the old covenant was a matter of external regulations, ceremonies, foods, actions which could never touch the conscience of the worshiper, but the new covenant cleansed and changed the heart. The real thing is a relationship from the heart.
God says it through Paul in Colossians that "Christ in you is the hope of glory." The hope is not me. The hope is Christ who dwells in me. In the new covenant we can know God through a forgiven and changed heart. They will all know me, God promises, for I will forgive them and remember their sin no more.
Clearly the idea of being God's people is to know the Lord and that is not just knowing about the Lord, but knowing Him, hearing from Him relating to Him.
Too often people place God in the slot of "a done deal" because at one time they came to an altar and accepted him as their savior. But that action does not necessarily equal entrance into covenant with God.
I was at a party a week ago and was chatting with a woman who said she had been raised in the Wesleyan church but that she and her husband have never gone to church since they have been married.
I said, "Oh really, well I hope that just because you left the church you have not left the faith."
"Oh, no," she said, "I still believe."
"Oh, good, that means you are reading the Bible at home and praying regularly and have a vital relationship with Jesus."
"No," she said, " we never do any of that."
"Let me ask you a question," I responded. "If you were never to speak to your husband for a week would you have a very good relationship?"
"No, we would have a terrible one," she responded.
"Then how can you claim Christian faith when you never relate to the God you claim to believe in?" I reminded her that the Gospel is about relationship with Jesus and encouraged her to not rest in a claim of belief but instead follow it up with an action of faith. The real thing is a living relationship with Jesus.
We have a tendency to believe we are saved, but don't believe we have to have a relationship with Jesus to demonstrate that salvation.
Salvation is about the action of God in Jesus our high priest who made possible our participation in a covenant not of our making. We enter that covenant by faith and continue in it day by day by faith we are in relationship with God.
- When in such a relationship then God knows our needs and meets them. I was struck with the story of a little girl in an orphanage in Kazakhstan.
She was among the many children there who received a shoebox gift, and was thankful for our box but went and said this to the house mother. "I appreciate the gift, but what I really need is parents." This Christian Care-giver, having more faith than most, simply replied, "Well, just pray and ask God for parents."
So, the little girl did pray and went off to open her box. Within she found wonderful gifts and a cared with a photo from the family who gave the box - a couple with no children. She prayed, and then wrote to the couple - thanking them for the gifts and explaining her circumstance and how she was praying to God for parents.
The American couple, so touched by this little girl, found their way to her village in Kazakhstan to meet her. They ended up adopting the little girl. But that's not the end to the miracle in this shoe box … their miracle so touched other childless couples they knew, that several other families went to the same orphanage and adopted children!
God has met Emily Hayden in a similarly marvelous way recently. She had a clothing disaster, and I am not certain of all the circumstances, but was down to one set of clothes which were all she had to wear for the past 2 weeks. A coat she had had disappeared and another had been destroyed, literally melted, in the drier there. She was left without resource. So, she prayed. She trusted that God would know her needs and meet them.
Well, God heard her heart and sent a couple to the Teen Mania campus to visit her. Before they got there the woman had said to her husband, I believe God is saying we will need to buy Emily some clothes when we get there. So, as they waited for Emily the woman observed what the girls wore at the Honor Academy. She was making a mental list.
Emily came out and they met one another, and then offered to take her to dinner. "Oh," Emily responded, "I cannot go to dinner, I have not got any money."
"Emily, we would like to take you and pay for it," they replied.
Emily began to cry. "But I don't have anything to wear," she said and began to cry harder. The woman said to me, "I knew then that God had sent us to minister to her in a special way."
"Well, honey, you look fine." She said. "Let's go eat and then we will find some clothes for you."
They went out to dinner and Emily "ate like she had never eaten," and then they went to some six stores to buy some new clothes. They took Emily back to her dorm before curfew with some $1500 worth of clothes to outfit her for a while. She was so thankful and so excited.
The story reminded me that when we have the real thing of a relationship with God, then God can work in marvelous and abundant ways in our lives.
- The Covenant Faith that God has invited you and me into is not a matter of you being really good to please an impossible to please God, but a matter of relationship with this God who has established covenant. It is a matter of your heart in love with Him, and in daily conversation with Him. IT is a matter of not trying to make it all happen on your own, it is not a matter of waving at God and saying, "Thanks for bringing me this far, I'll take it from here," but a matter of allowing this God into every breath, every moment of every day and hearing the call of the Spirit of God reminding you that the real thing is to Know the Lord.
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