Then They Will See<title> <link rel="STYLESHEET" type="text/css" href="../../sermon.css"> <style fprolloverstyle>A:hover {color: #FF0000} </style> <style type="text/css"> p { font-family: sans-serif; font-size: small; text-align: justify; } cite { font-variant: small-caps; font-size: smaller; } </style> <link rel="STYLESHEET" type="text/css" href="../2002/sermon.css"> </head> <body bgcolor="#FFFFFF" vlink="#0000FF"> <table BORDER=0 CELLSPACING=0 CELLPADDING=4 > <tr VALIGN=BASELINE BGCOLOR="#FFFFFF"> <td COLSPAN="2" BGCOLOR="#000080"> <b> <font color="#FFFFFF"> <span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: Times New Roman; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA">  Then They Will See </span> </font> </b> <font color="#FFFFFF"><br>A Sermon based on </font> <a target="_blank" href="http://bible.gospelcom.net/cgi-bin/bible?language=english&version=NIV&passage=Luke+21:25-36"><font color="#FFFFFF"><span style="mso-fareast-font-family: Times New Roman; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA">Luke 21:25-36</span></font></a> </td> </tr> <tr> <td COLSPAN="2" width="640">  <p>This sermon began coming together for me somewhere in rural southwestern Kentucky about this time last week, when Nancy and I were on our way home from being with her family for Thanksgiving. It finally came together yesterday afternoon about two-o'clock as I was standing at the hospital bedside of one of our elderly members who is dying.</p> <p>As we were driving along the other day, I became convinced that there must be more religious signs per highway mile in southwest Kentucky than anywhere else in all of the United States. You can hardly drive any distance at all without reading something about God on the highway. Nancy and I had started home together at five a.m. last Sunday morning thinking it would be easy to stop virtually anywhere along the road and get something for breakfast. A hundred and fifty miles and three hours later we stumbled onto something that resembled civilization where we were finally able to get something to eat.</p> <p>In the meantime, we enjoyed seeing some of the most remarkably beautiful country we have ever seen. Even though all the leaves have already fallen, in a place where winter comes sooner and stays longer than it does here, it was still remarkably beautiful. The fields full of winter wheat were emerald green. The bare trees looked dark against the gray skies; all the colors just seemed to flow together and paint a beautiful landscape.</p> <p>We even got to see what they call the confluence of the Ohio and the Mississippi Rivers. Standing on a high bluff north of the confluence, we found ourselves on the very spot, where, on their early 19th century westward expedition, Lewis and Clark marked the map as the place where they would later recommend that President Andrew Jackson build a fort. This same place is not far down the Mississippi River from Cairo, Illinois, where Gen. Ulysses S. Grant embarked with his Union army to begin the western campaign that marked the beginning of the end of the Civil War. It was a remarkable place of history and of beauty.</p> <p>As we continued our drive, I saw a sign that asked the question, "If you were to die tonight, where would you spend eternity?" I turned to Nancy and said, "I think something has been changing in me. My theology has actually been changing." Which it should do as we grow and we learn more about God. Our theology should not remain the same as it is when we are children, should it?</p> <p>Friends of ours have a little girl who is about seven years of age. She asked her Sunday school teacher the other day who wrote the Bible. The teacher answered, "Well, we know that Matthew wrote "Matthew," and Mark wrote "Mark," and Luke wrote "Luke."" This little 7-year-old girl looked back and said, "You mean, there are two people named Corinthians?" Hopefully, as her theology grows, she will learn that no one named Corinthians wrote 1 and 2 Corinthians. But, right now, that's the way she sees the Bible.</p> <p>Back in the car, I turned to Nancy and said, "That billboard question makes me think of John 3:16. 'For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal, or everlasting, life.'" For a while we drove down the road, just the two of us, twelve hours together, talking about life and marriage and children and money and all the other things that go with being married to each other. We also talked a lot about God and about faith, about Cliff Temple, about what ministry is like in this place. We talked about what it means to be where we are at this point in our lives, in our faith journey. I reflected to Nancy that, when I was growing up, when I was being trained in the earliest days of my theology, which is just our way of thinking about God, that question was posed to me often, as an evangelistic tool. It was a question we were encouraged to ask others in order to get them to think about their relationship with God in eternal terms. "If you were to die tonight, where would you spend eternity?"</p> <p>The problem was, as I look back on it, that question so narrowly defined salvation for me as eternity-future, that I almost totally neglected what it meant to be eternally alive right now. Since then, I've come to understand what Jesus said a little bit differently. He was the one who said those words, by the way. John recorded them, but Jesus spoke them. "For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believes in him should not live a perishing kind of life now but have an eternal kind of life now." As I've come to understand that scripture more fully, I've also come to appreciate that eternity, as Jesus defined it, is not just a length of time but, more, a quality of life.</p> <p>So, as we drove on down the road, the question began to shape differently in my mind as I reflected on the scripture for this morning. The question for me has become of late not, "Where will I spend eternity?" but, "If God were to let me live another 24 hours, how will I spend that day?" Will it be a perishing kind of day that has no eternal value to it, or will it be a day that has, in quantity and substance and meaning, an eternal quality of life to it? So that, by the way I'm spending my time and my energy and my resources, but in particular, in the ways I'm treating other people, by forgiving and seeking forgiveness, will my life today, the next 24 hours if God grants it, have something to show for it in eternity future?</p> <p>The words that stand out to me in this scripture in some ways are words of nature. It's coming up on wintertime, isn't it? All the leaves have fallen. If I'm correct, the winter solstice will be on us here in about 17 or 18 days. It will be the shortest day of the year, the first day of winter. But already, the signs are showing. It's getting cold. The increasingly shorter days are saying to us that it won't be long until the coldest days of the year will be upon us. We'll be glad we wrapped our pipes and brought our plants in and stocked up on firewood and had our furnaces serviced.</p> <p>Jesus would say to us, using that analogy, "You can look around at nature and see that something is about to happen. Fall has passed away. Summer is long gone. Winter is about to be here." In the same way, he said, <strong>"Look at the fig trees. As soon as they sprout leaves, you can see for yourselves that summer is already near. And so, when you see these things taking place, you know the kingdom of God is near."</strong></p> <p>What things? Well, Jesus talked about things that will be calamities of nature that make all of us anxious. We won't need the Internet to tell us that something's happened on the other side of the globe, because, according to the words of Jesus, these calamities of nature will be so grand that all mankind will be able to observe them. Earlier in this very same chapter, Jesus had also said there would be wars and rumors of wars. Yet, has there any given time, any day, when those wouldn't be the headlines in <em>The Dallas Morning News</em>, or on CNN.com? Have we ever been alive in a time when there weren't wars and rumors of wars and famines and plagues?</p> <p>How do we know which wars? Which rumors? Which famines and plagues are the ones that will signal the coming of Jesus? How do we know? We don't. Jesus was simply saying to us, I believe, that anytime we're alive is a time to be prepared for the coming of Jesus and to so adjust our moral and spiritual compasses that the moment we're living in, not the moment we die, but the moment we've living in right now could be measured in terms of eternal value. Jesus says, <strong>"Don't be weighed down with dissipation and drunkenness and the cares of this world."</strong> Since <strong>"dissipation"</strong> isn't a word that we tend to use in our daily vocabulary, it might help to understand it a little bit. It basically just means "self-centered living." A person's life whose moral compass just gravitates around their own personal desires and needs. When Jesus was talking about drunkenness, he was not just talking about chemical alteration of our minds. He was talking about being drunk with self. Drunk with pride. Weighed down, he said, by the cares of the world, like when we spend our time thinking just about ourselves, intoxicated by materialism and the busyness and hard work it takes to obtain and acquire and continue to obtain all the things of the world. Living like that, the spring of resurrection could bloom all around us, and we'd never even see it.</p> <p>So, here's the question for this morning. It's one thing to think about what God did in Christ 2000 years ago. We are celebrating that all month, as we should. That's the first advent. The first coming of God in the person of Jesus. This scripture is talking about the second advent, the second coming of Jesus. The question I would ask is, are we so consumed with the cares of this world, the things that keep us distracted from the howling dogs of guilt and fear and anxiety in the basement of our souls, that we aren't even aware of what God is up to in this moment? Is the light of God showing in your life and your heart today? What would you do without resurrection light?</p> <p>When we were in Kentucky, we were following the map we had in the atlas but we still got totally lost. We followed the highway that the map said would take us directly across the Mississippi River. But, when we got to the end of the road, literally out in the middle of nowhere, the road dead-ended into a forest. There was no crossing of the Mississippi River, despite what the map said. So, we stopped. We couldn't even tell where we were, which way we were pointing. We knew we wanted to go west. Nancy asked, "Which way is west?" I said, with a little sarcasm that got me in a little trouble, "Well, I think it's the opposite way of east, which is where the sun is coming up." We were only able to tell where we were because the sun was coming up in the east and we knew that west was the other direction. Where would you be without resurrection light in your life to show you the way in a dark world? Or, if you're so weighed down with the concerns of the world, would you even see the light if the sun was rising right in front of you?</p> <p>My brother-in-law, Pat, is seventy years old. I'm going to tell you a story that was hilarious to me. I've told it two to three times since then and no one has enjoyed it as much as I did, so don't feel like you owe me mercy laughter. I just want to tell you the story. It was funny to me, and it has a great moral point. Pat and his wife have lived on a farm for years. They've had all different kinds of animals. They're not farmers. Pat is an audiologist. Farming is just a hobby for them. At one time they raised miniature goats. This one miniature billy goat weighed about ninety pounds and Pat said it just kept him fascinated. For some reason, he always wanted to grab the goat's horns. Now, again, this miniature billy goat weighed only about ninety pounds. Real short to the ground. Pat's about 5"-10" and weighs about two-hundred. Pretty stocky guy.</p> <p>One day, Pat finally got close enough to the goat while it was distracted eating from a trough on the other side of a short fence. He reached over the fence and grabbed the goat by its horns. He said the very next thing that happened was that he found himself laying on his back behind the goat in eight inches of goat poop. That little ninety-pound goat was so strong it jerked him back over itself and threw him into the goat pen with him. He finally got his wish. He'd grabbed the goats horns. What happened to him after that happened so fast he didn't even have time to think about letting go.</p> <p>It is one thing, isn't it, when somebody gets your goat. It is another thing when your goat gets you! The moral of the story being that, sometimes, all these things we spend more money on than we have at Christmas, that we think we just have to have, we often come to find out later really have us. These days, with credit cards and e-shopping, you can get what you want so fast that, before you know it, it's got you. When our stuff owns us, it's virtually impossible to see what God's up to, isn't it? Jesus would say to us, "don't be weighed down. Sit up. Pay attention." The Jesus who came is coming again to finish his work of reconciling the world unto himself. Are you aware of that? Does your life show it?</p> <p>I said this sermon ended in its preparation yesterday afternoon about two-o'clock. I've spent a good part of the last couple of days with one of our elderly gentlemen who is eighty-six and dying. You probably would not know this man because he and his wife joined here about five or six years ago, by which time she already had Alzheimer's and they have not been able to attend church.</p> <p>I stood over his bed and held his hand, which was shaking because Parkinson's has now taken hold. He's lying there, totally incapable of taking care of himself. He began to share with me some of the most personal and sincere things about life and his honest experience with faith and fear that I've ever heard in my life. I thanked him for honoring me with those confessions and that he would allow me to share this moment in his life. I told him, "I've never been where you are." He knows he's dying. He said, "I don't know how to get hold of this." I said, "Well, maybe what you need to do, then, when you're trying to get hold of it [and Pat and the goat were actually coming back to mind], maybe the only thing you can do when you can't take control is just let go."</p> <p>The moment lightened up for just a little, so I was able to say to him, "I've never been a good water skier, and now I will never water-ski again. But I do remember the very first lesson they give in waterskiing." Do you remember what it is? The very first thing they teach you in waterskiing is, when you fall, what do you do? Let go. You see, when you start falling, the only way waterskiing can hurt you is if you decide you're going to hold on anyway. Then you become a two-hundred pound stone skipping across the water, being dragged at the mercy of the boat, having the life beat out of you. So I said to this dear man, "Maybe that's how this is. You just let go." And he said, "Well, how do you do that?" And I said, "I don't know. I've never had to do it before." He said, "Well, will you help me?"</p> <p>You know why I came here this morning? I came here this morning because, even though I'm a preacher, one of the hardest things in the world for me to do is to not get weighed down by the worries of this life. So much so that, even if Jesus walked right into this room, I wouldn't even see him. I came here this morning, and I come here every Sunday, because I need help letting go. I don't know how to do it all by myself, like Jesus did. But, I was wondering if maybe you and I together could help each other learn how to do that. You see, when we let go, and we absolutely trust the Jesus who has come and is coming, <strong>"Then they will see"</strong> (the world) that the Light of the world is in us.</p> <p>Then they will see. When we let go.</p> <hr width="100%" /> </td> </tr> <tr> <td> Glen Schmucker, Pastor </td> <td> <div align=right>  December 3, 2006 </div> </td> </tr> <tr> <td COLSPAN=2> Copyright © 2006, Glen Schmucker </td> </tr> </table> </body> </html>