April 2, 2000

SERMON: THE HIGHER CALL - THROUGH GRACE!

Eldridge E. Fleming, Ph.D.

New Hope Presbyterian Church

Rienzi, Mississippi

Fourth Sunday in Lent

Health Awareness Sunday

Readings: Numbers 21:4-9; Ephesians 2:1-10; John 3:14-21

The Call to Worship: (Psalm 107: 1-3, 17-22).

The Children's Message:

Good to see you this morning! What is happening outside? What's going on? Rain. It is raining. Do you like rain? Sometimes. Sometimes you like some of it. What is there about it that you don't like? What do you not like about rain? Can't play. You can't play where? Outside. Outside. Now if you can't play outside, does that mess up playing altogether? Just about. Okay. Well, if you play outside mostly, that does mess it up -- unless, unless you enjoy playing in wet dirt. What do we call that? What do we call wet dirt? Mud. Mud, okay. I thought for a minute you guys didn't know what that is. Wet dirt is mud. When you've got a little too much wetness in it, instead of moist soil, it becomes mud. What does mud do? Does it get on you? Yes. What happens when you get mud on you? I'm grounded. You're grounded. All right! Mud is a natural process. Just naturally if we put water on dirt and it stays very long and we play in it, we're going to get mud on us. If we get mud on our shoes and mud on our clothes, we get in trouble with mom -- mostly mom -- and sometimes with dad.

What would happen if we didn't get the rain? We wouldn't be grounded. That's right. But what would happen to the soil if we didn't get rain? Everything would die. Everything would die is right. So rain is very, very important. We get a lot of rain around here. How tall are you, Clint? About 5' 2". Five two -- that's sixty-two inches, right? I don't know about that. You don't know about that. All right.

What I'm getting at is that we get about fifty inches of rain in this section each year. That is about as tall as Anna is. That much water we get in a year. Did you ever think about that? And if we don't get that water, what happens to the waters that feed the wells that we have? That water goes deeper into the ground and we don't have as much to drink. When you don't have water to drink, friend, you're in trouble. You have to have water. So rain is God's way of making things grow and making things stay alive. It is good to have rain. When we thank the Lord for sending rain, that is what we're thinking about. We thinking of all those nice green leaves and all the nice green grass. Now the downside to having all that green grass is that if you slide on it, you might get a green stain on your clothes -- and you also have to cut the grass.

The point is this: Without the rain, things would die and we would have the desert. Have you ever been in the desert? Sandy, dry dirt. Just dry. You'd starve to death if you get out there and don't have any water. So rain is very important. And the way that the world is created is so that we get those things that we need and that is a great gift of God. We'll talk later about some other gifts of God.

There is one other thing that is outside that you will hear about this morning. Do you ever play with snakes? Sort of. You stay on your side and they stay on their side. Yes. Well, out in the desert sometimes they have snakes. Little snakes. Deadly snakes. We're going to talk some about those in a little bit.

I want you to just think about today and the rain that is falling. It is nice and everything is going to be greener than it has been before. We're excited about that. Let's bow our heads together.

Lord, we thank You for the rain because it not only washes the leaves and the trees and the grass clean, but it also helps them to grow. It gives us water to drink and for that we are grateful. This is just another sign, O Lord, of all Your kindness and mercy to us. We're grateful for it, and we thank You for it through Jesus Christ, our Lord. Amen.

Thanks for being here.

The Scripture Reading:

Our Old Testament reading this morning comes from Numbers 21:4-9. This is the experience, of course, of the children of Israel as they are wandering around in the desert.

Our reading from the epistle is from Ephesians 2:1-10.

The gospel reading for the morning comes from John 3:14-21. Would you stand with me if you can, please, as we hear the gospel?

The Word of God for the people of God. Thanks be to God.

The Sermon:

The thought for the morning is that there is a higher call and that call is a call to a higher way of living -- a higher life than the one we would ordinarily know. I want us to begin with those three passages of scripture and progress through them so that we can move onto this level that we hear about from this writer of Ephesians.

So first, let us take a look at the Book of Numbers. This book was written so that the Israelites could have some record of how God had interacted with their people in history. At this point they are moving around in the desert. They've had opportunities to go into the Promised Land, but they had already said, "No, we don't want to do that."

It is interesting, is it not, that whenever there was the opportunity to go into the land of Canaan, they rejected it? They rejected it because they thought that the people who were already there were so into the land that they couldn't get them out. Even though God had promised that He would help them and would move out the Canaanites and others who were there in that Promised Land, they didn't trust God to do that. Even though Caleb and Joshua said to them, "It's easy. We can do it. With God on our side, we can do it."

They didn't want to run the risk, so they kind of followed the route of those who are the majority. They said, "We'll just play it safe." Playing it safe, however, meant that they were going to wander around until those who were twenty to thirty years of age died off because of old age. Because they decided not to go in, they wandered around for forty years until those in that decision-making process had died. This is telling about what happened during that period of time of wandering around in the desert.

They left this particular place after a successful encounter with the Canaanite king, Arad, but as they went along, the people began to complain. Their complaints were that this was not what they had thought it would be. When we do things, we build our own expectations. We develop our vision of what it is that we are going into, and the children of Israel who left Egypt had a vision of what they were going into. Every one of them had an idea of what was going to happen and as the communication from the leadership came to them more explicit from time to time, that vision got sharpened and focused. The one thing they had in mind, first and foremost, was they were leaving Egypt and getting out from under slavery. They were slaves.

As I said last week, they had been slaves for approximately ten generations. No short period of time this had been. For four hundred years they had been in Egypt and almost all of that time, they had been the slaves and servants of others. The first promise that came to them when Moses came trying to get them to leave Egypt, was that they were going to leave slavery. They would be free. For someone who was under slavery, under the burden of making bricks without straw this was a tremendous change. Can you imagine what would happen to you as a slave if this occurred? Your self-concept changes. Your vision changes. Their perception of what they were going to be doing and how things were going to go had shifted because they had rejected the possibility of going into the Promised Land as originally dreamed. Now they were wandering in the desert.

And of course, we have memories. We remember the old days. We remember how bad it was and when tested with the choice of going back to it, we really don't want to go back. But we use that as a basis of complaint. So they came to Moses and complained, "Why did you bring us out here in the middle of the desert so that we would starve to death and die? This is terrible. Why did you and God do this? Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness? We could have died in Egypt. It was easy. We buried all of our ancestors down there for all these generations, why did you mess with our status? If you hadn't come along, they wouldn't have made it so stringent on us and we wouldn't have had to work so hard and wouldn't have been beaten so badly before we finally left. If you just hadn't disturbed us, it would have been fine."

God doesn't think kindly to things like that. Whenever you begin to question God's judgment, you really get on thin ice. You may well be melting yourself right through to oblivion in a hurry, because God knows where He is going. God says to them and to us, "You haven't seen anything yet!" Well, not exactly in this case did that happen immediately, but it would eventually.

What did happen almost immediately after this was that they moved, apparently, to an area where there were a lot of snakes. Little snakes crawling around in the desert without a whole lot of things to eat except what they have scrounge for, surely can get poisonous. When they bit the children of Israel, those people almost immediately died. So they have another problem. Again a crisis sometimes will change our focus and change our view and our vision of things, and so, after they began dying of these snake bites, they came back to Moses with the realization that things were now worse than they were before. They said, "We have sinned."

That is the first admission that gets you going in the right direction. When you say to yourself, to your friends, to God, especially, "I sinned." What does sin in this case stand for? What does it mean? It means that they got their eye off of the focus. They missed the bulls eye. They missed the target. They accused Moses and his God, his Leader, that they brought them out into the desert to die. They missed the target. They sinned by getting their focus on the wrong things. They lived in such a way that was improper. So they came confessing that they had sinned. "We didn't see that right. We did that we were not supposed to. We have sinned by speaking against the Lord and against you." Then they said, "You pray for us."

Moses obliged. He was quite willing to pray for his people. In fact, on one occasion at some other point, you remember that he asked the Lord to blot him out of His book forever, and just take care of his people. So Moses prayed for his people. And the Lord answered him, according to Numbers, and immediately said to him, "I'll tell you what you are to do. Make a snake and put it up on a pole where they can all see it. If someone is bitten, have them look at the snake and they will live." God didn't take the snakes away. Notice? He left the snakes there. That was their habitat. They had invaded the snakes' territory. There were snakes all over the place. And while they were moving through this special area of their trial, they ran the risk of death. But God in His mercy said, "While you are here and while that death possibility is there, if you are bitten -- or when you are bitten -- look at the pole. Look at the brass serpent on the pole and you will live."

Do you get that picture? Do you see what is happening? There is an act of faith, there is an act of courage, there is an act of commitment, there is an acknowledgment of the possibility of dying for everyone who acts on this promise. I can just see someone now, bitten, falling to the ground, feeling weak, crowd coming around, trying to soothe them and comfort them, and all of a sudden this person says, "Move out of the way. Move out of the way. Let me see." They separate the crowd so they can look and find the serpent on the pole. I can imagine someone with creativity saying a prayer, thanking God in advance for mercy.

Now this pole was not one that you just get a bush and stick up out of the ground. This was a great mass of humanity. I remember in my Sunday School days when I was a youngster, seeing pictures of this scene. There were three or four hundred -- maybe -- folks in the scene, and here was this pole sticking up eight or ten feet in the middle of the camp. No friends, that wouldn't do the trick. This was a mass of humanity and to have it where they could see, this pole had to be a tall pole in the middle of the camp. The question comes, "Where on earth would you find such a pole in the desert?" You'd have to use some other pole that you'd found or some sort of miraculous pole or something to lift that up. The point is you had to see it and you had to believe it and you had to trust it. If you didn't trust it, you wouldn't look.

So it is with us. If we don't trust God, we don't look for God's answers. We don't look for that serpent in the wilderness.

Now go over with me to the third chapter of John. Jesus is talking with Nicodemus. Jesus is explaining to Nicodemus who he is and about what his life is. He said, "Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up." Why did Moses raise the serpent in the wilderness? To bring healing to his people, to offer them a way of salvation, a way of life. "I'm going to be lifted up," he said, "like that bronze serpent in the wilderness."

Can you see, then, why through the ages we have always seen the scenes of the cross with that central cross higher than all the rest, standing so tall that the whole world can see it from wherever they are? Because in the vision of that cross, the seeing of that cross, in the act of that cross, there is healing. There is healing for broken spirits. There is healing for wounded souls. By looking at the cross, there is healing for those who are destined for destruction. Jesus is saying, "Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up."

Jesus knew his destiny. He understood it. And as John, years later, is writing about this, he is telling this so that we will understand it in this sense, in this clearer vision. When we pray, when we seek God's forgiveness, when we seek salvation -- life that is, eternal life -- from God, we seek it through that cross. That is the way it has remained through all these days. It is not the way of the world, not the way of the world at all; it is just the way of God. Yes, the people said, "We have sinned. We have spoken with evil against you. Now pray for us. Moses did and those were the results."

Turn with me to Ephesians (2:1-10) and let us take a few moments to look at this writing and think about what Paul was saying. Jesus had his experience. He died on the cross. He was resurrected. That had happened. Now Paul is writing to the Ephesians where he spent over two years on one occasion working with them. He says to those friends of his that he is writing to, "You were dead through trespasses and sins." That is nothing new. "We all did that," he said. Those "trespasses and sins in which you once lived, following the course of this world, following the ruler of the power of the air, the spirit that is at work among those who are disobedient."

There is a spirit in the world. It is a happy-go-lucky, everything is okay, do what you want to, enjoy life to the full -- all of those things -- and we use some of those phrases ourselves. But if you do that altogether, you don't have much regard for the cross on the hill. You don't have much regard for the serpent of healing raised in the midst of the wilderness, because those things are too burdensome. But to have Christian faith, you work at that giving of yourself.

Now watch the rest. "All of us once lived among them in the passions of our flesh." The apostle is telling his own natural instincts, as well. "Following the desires of flesh and senses, and we were by nature children of wrath, like everyone else." We are no different, Paul said. We are the same. We go wandering along just like everyone else. But God is different. God, "who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which He loved us even when we were dead through our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ - ."

Here Paul gets wrought-up. He throws in an extra phrase. He tells you the bottom line before he gets to the punch line. "By grace you have been saved." He just blurts that out in the middle of the sentence. "And raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places with Christ Jesus." Through Christ Jesus all of this has happened. "So that in the ages to come he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us again in Christ Jesus. For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God - not the result of works, so that no one may boast."

And then watch the mercy of God work with us in the next phrase; for you see, we do the best we can. We pray as often as we can and struggle with God and our faith as much as we can, but if we were left to our own inventions we would not have enough goodness to get us anywhere. So watch the next verse. "For we are what he has made us...." Not because we have stayed in the ways we were, but because we have been obedient enough to do the best we can and we have allowed ourselves to be shaped, reformed, remade, re-birthed -- for "he has made us, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life."

That is a powerful verse! We need to etch it in our minds. For God has made us to be what we are, and he has made us to be what we are through Christ Jesus. He has done that for good works. And this is what "God prepared beforehand to be our way of life."

Too much, isn't it? Too much all in one day? Oh my! You see us wandering in the wilderness of life, doing like everybody else and the crises come and the challenges come and off in the middle of this wilderness is a calling to "come to me." Jesus said it, "And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself."(John 12:32) And there in the middle of the wilderness of life, there rises a cross that reminds us of God's mercy. God has worked through that and worked in us so that we might be ready to do the good works that he has said for us to do. He prepared that to be our way of life.

Let us not forget that there is a higher call and that higher call is through that symbol and it is through the good works God has prepared for us to do. May we then answer that higher call through grace in Christ Jesus, our Lord. Amen.