When God Does Something New
Sermon
Walking With God
Cycle A First Lesson Sermons for Proper 23 through Thanksgiving
Object:
After a prolonged spate of bad news about the national and global economic situation, we welcome good news about the economy, even if it's only a little bit of good news. Likewise, after a long illness, we enjoy hearing our physician tell us that things are going to look up for us soon. And who wouldn't be glad to hear about their child or grandchild striking a winning rhythm at work after an extended season of losses characterized by his or her performance?
Jeremiah welcomed the good news about God's plan for his people. A prophet who grieved for Israel for four decades, Jeremiah had been unsuccessful in his attempt to persuade the leaders to return to the Lord. For his work at preaching faithfully and hopefully about the need for spiritual renewal, he received little more than rejection, humiliation, and persecution. To add insult to injury, he had the unenviable privilege of watching the people suffer the consequences because they didn't heed his warning about God's judgment if they didn't repent. As they marched to captivity in a foreign land, he lamented the fate they had inflicted upon themselves.
So when God told him about a new day and a new covenant with his people coming sometime in the future, Jeremiah's heart must have done backflips! Because of God's promise to do something new among his people, Jeremiah could rest in unabated assurance. Somehow God would restore the broken relationship with his people
Today we call attention to God's new work among his people. In this worship experience, we need to talk about how we have seen God do something new among us for his glory. Of course, the backdrop for our time together is a time in history when God did something new in the life of his people, an episode that we have come to call the Protestant Reformation.
Because of what we have encountered in the New Testament, we affirm that God's new day centered in Jesus Christ, his Son. We rejoice every time we read about John the Baptist's introduction of Jesus as the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. We agree with the individuals who listened to Jesus and remarked that he spoke with authority. Like the folks then, we listen to the words of Jesus and confirm that he speaks out of a firsthand relationship with the Father. He assured us that we could have that kind of relationship with God ourselves through him.
So it has been for us who have given ourselves to Jesus Christ. We rest in the confidence that Christ's death made it possible for us to experience life as God intended from the beginning. His resurrection declares for us that we don't need to be afraid of death. He overcame it, and so will we. Our faith in Christ gives us peace about the future. Eternity with him is our inheritance. We are blessed indeed because God kept his promise of doing something new with his people.
Jeremiah reminds us of the place in which God would do something new. In Jeremiah 31:33, he identified it as the heart. Of course, mentioning the heart in those days meant talking about the center of a person's being, the core of his or her life, the wellspring of life itself. Down in the core of a person's life, God intended to do something new. He intended to plant his law there. Instead of writing it on stone, like he did on Mount Sinai, he would script it in the hearts of the people who followed him. There it would have a definite effect. It would be the beginning of something new.
Has God shown how he can do something new among his people by working their hearts? Absolutely! He has demonstrated the way he can transform a person from inside out. One changed person affects another person until an entire city or country is affected by what God's doing in their hearts.
In the January 12, 2008, issue of The New York Times, an article was published about the retirement of a minister. What's interesting about the article was that the minister was the pastor of St. Nicholas Church in Leipzig, Germany. The story in the article recounted something that had happened at the church and in the city on October 9, 1989. What happened then and there reflects well on how God can do something new in the hearts of his people.
In 1982, the minister began leading prayer meetings at St. Nicholas Church in Leipzig on Mondays. The exclusive purpose of the Monday night prayer meetings was to pray for peace. Having grown up in Leipzig during a time when the city was under Communist rule, the pastor knew about the tension among the people and the East German government. Leipzig happened to be his hometown. He studied theology at Karl Marx University. Before the iron curtain fell, it was called the University of Leipzig, a fine school with a long and rich history. He also learned Greek and Latin there. At the same time, he worked summers in a car factory and rode his motorcycle around the city delivering telegrams. He also worked as a train waiter. Through these jobs and his university experience, he could hear what the people were actually saying about the oppression imposed by the Communist government that ruled with an iron hand at that time.
The pastor's name served as a self-fulfilling prophecy. Christian Fuhrer came to be a fitting name for the pastor. Of course, he was a Christian. And in the German language, the term Fuhrer means leader. The term had been tarnished by the abuse associated with Hitler. Pastor Fuhrer redeemed the term by leading the people to embrace freedom instead of totalitarianism.
Pastor Fuhrer had been influenced as a child by the example set by Jesus. He noticed that Jesus cared for the powerless, the outsiders, and the neglected. As a pastor, he started the prayer meetings with the hope that his church would reflect the care of Christ for the disenfranchised. He dreamed that it could be a place in which the people in Leipzig could talk about and pray for peace. Little did he know when he started the prayer meetings that they would be associated in due time with the collapse of the Berlin Wall.
Starting in 1982, the prayer group met every Monday at his church. The historic Protestant church in the middle of the city became a focal point as the prayer meeting group grew over time. And for Pastor Fuhrer, the prayer meetings helped him to engage his congregants in something that would address the struggles they faced under Communist rule.
In February 1988, the pastor invited fifty people who advocated the right to leave East Germany to join his Monday night prayer groups so they could talk about the issue. About 600 people showed up, including the participants in his prayer group. In May of that year, the police blocked traffic to the church in fear that the crowd had grown too large. When they blocked the traffic, they thought they had put an end to what they feared would be an insurrection.
The barricade didn't stop the people from coming to the church. It had quite the opposite effect. The crowd grew as people attended regularly each Monday night with lighted candles in hand. Pastor Fuhrer encouraged them to carry candles because it would require both hands. With both hands occupied to keep the candles lit while walking, the temptation to pick up a stone and throw it at the police would be diminished.
The Monday night prayer group of a few people grew. One night a crowd of 70,000 people gathered and engaged in a non-violent demonstration. It came to be called the Monday Demonstration on October 9. Pastor Fuhrer urged the people to refrain from violence at the demonstration. Prior to that night, the police had brutalized and threatened the participants who attended the prayer meeting. However, by that time of the October 9 meeting, the police didn't stop it, probably because they couldn't or perhaps they favored the stand the people were taking -- a stand regarding the need to be free from Communist rule.
The next Monday night, 120,000 people showed up for the demonstration, candles in hand. Things happened quickly after that night. On November 9, 1989, the Berlin Wall fell.
According to an article in Ecumenical News International dated April 30, 2009, the Communist party leader Horst Sindermann lamented the collapse of his government in the wake of the Monday demonstrations. In his lamentation, he confessed, "We were prepared for everything, but not candles and prayers."
Pastor Fuhrer led the people to carry candles and to pray for peace. With the candles in hand, they couldn't give in to the temptation to be violent. With prayers in their hearts, they overcame the fear for their lives. In prayer, they availed themselves to God who would do something new in their hearts.
Some political scholars say what happened wasn't a spiritual renewal. Rather, it was only a political demonstration. When you think about people walking into the face of their fear every Monday night, you have to conclude that their hearts had been stirred, but not by political speeches. Their hearts had been stirred by the Lord who is always eager to do something new among his people if we allow him to do it.
Jeremiah's prophecy promises us that God's in the business of doing something new in the hearts of his people.
It also promises that God's ready to help people have a change of heart, the kind of change that can last into eternity. He is willing to do something about the sin in our hearts.
Through Jeremiah's prophecy, God told the people of Israel that he would forgive their sin and blot out any memory of their sin (v. 34). He made this promise to them in keeping with his pledge to do something new in their hearts. By connecting the removal of sin with the renewal of their hearts, God demonstrated that he considered sin to be a serious problem. Also, he validated his desire to do something about it.
One of the primary leaders of the Protestant Reformation had his struggle with sin to thank for the way God changed his heart. Of course, we are talking about Martin Luther. The awareness of his sin troubled him throughout his young life, and his dread fear of God drove him to find a way to deal with his sin.
On July 2, 1507, for example, he encountered a terrible storm that frightened him into becoming a monk. He devoted himself to being an obedient monk and did everything he could to please God. But all the while, he grieved over his sin. He couldn't find any way out of his sin condition. The law of God convicted him, the wrath of God frightened him, and the righteousness of God angered him. Frustrated, he could hardly endure his awful situation.
Then God in his great mercy pointed Luther to Romans 1:17. There he saw that a righteous person lives by faith. He understood that he couldn't get rid of his sin himself and that Christ has already paid the price for his sin. He grasped that his only response to Christ's gift of salvation was to receive it by faith. That's when he was born again, born from above. His heart was transformed by God's grace in Christ and his response of faith. He lived out Paul's statement that we are saved by grace through faith (Ephesians 2:8).
From that moment, Luther's work took on new meaning. For the next 25 years or so, he devoted himself to proclaiming what it meant to live by faith. His passion for his work got him into more than a little trouble, but he didn't back down or recant. His devotion to God's word prompted him to translate the entire Bible into the German language. Although he spent his life in the little town of Wittenberg, his influence was felt all over Europe. In time other reformers would join him in his work.
What prompted him to make such a monumental impact on his world? Was it a desire to leave a legacy? Was it selfish ambition? Was it awareness that he had a unique message that people wanted to hear? No! He was moved by the Christ who had forgiven his sins and had transformed his heart in the process.
In fact, history shows that many reformers didn't set out to make names for themselves. Like Luther, they simply wanted to share God's gracious message of salvation by faith in Christ. Their Christ-centered message sparked a firestorm time and again in the hearts of people who listened to them. By pointing sinners to Jesus as the only way of salvation, they kindled a spiritual fire that swept their land.
Again, why did they share such a flammable message? Only one reason makes sense. They had experienced the radical change of heart associated with God's grace and mercy in forgiving them of their sins, blotting them from his memory forever. They were compelled to pass the gospel of Christ along to others who ached over their sin as well.
The reformation that gave Martin Luther a place in history books wasn't confined to his native land. It spread beyond the borders of Germany to other parts of Europe. Soon evidences of it showed up in Great Britain. Preachers in that country began to proclaim salvation by grace through faith, and the result was a spiritual awakening that shook that part of the world. In due time, the message of spiritual transformation made its way to the new land of America, and with it came revival. From one coast to the next, the grace of God shown in Jesus Christ has set people free from their sins.
Spiritual transformation isn't only something we talk about in past tense. It's a present reality in many parts of the world today. News from Central and South America, for example, gives us encouragement that the good news of Christ has invaded nations that have been closed by political decree. In Asia and Africa, growing numbers of people are experiencing spiritual transformation as the gospel of Christ is being presented. Other places around the world report the same good news.
Here in the United States, reports of spiritual awakening in some of our cities have been circulating for a while now. God has been changing hearts and transforming lives in places in which we thought he would have given up long ago.
Now to the questions before us. On this Reformation Sunday, what can we say about what God is doing among us? Is God showing that he's doing something among us that's making an eternal difference to anyone?
God's always in the business of doing something new among his people. And we are his people through Jesus Christ. Amen.
Jeremiah welcomed the good news about God's plan for his people. A prophet who grieved for Israel for four decades, Jeremiah had been unsuccessful in his attempt to persuade the leaders to return to the Lord. For his work at preaching faithfully and hopefully about the need for spiritual renewal, he received little more than rejection, humiliation, and persecution. To add insult to injury, he had the unenviable privilege of watching the people suffer the consequences because they didn't heed his warning about God's judgment if they didn't repent. As they marched to captivity in a foreign land, he lamented the fate they had inflicted upon themselves.
So when God told him about a new day and a new covenant with his people coming sometime in the future, Jeremiah's heart must have done backflips! Because of God's promise to do something new among his people, Jeremiah could rest in unabated assurance. Somehow God would restore the broken relationship with his people
Today we call attention to God's new work among his people. In this worship experience, we need to talk about how we have seen God do something new among us for his glory. Of course, the backdrop for our time together is a time in history when God did something new in the life of his people, an episode that we have come to call the Protestant Reformation.
Because of what we have encountered in the New Testament, we affirm that God's new day centered in Jesus Christ, his Son. We rejoice every time we read about John the Baptist's introduction of Jesus as the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. We agree with the individuals who listened to Jesus and remarked that he spoke with authority. Like the folks then, we listen to the words of Jesus and confirm that he speaks out of a firsthand relationship with the Father. He assured us that we could have that kind of relationship with God ourselves through him.
So it has been for us who have given ourselves to Jesus Christ. We rest in the confidence that Christ's death made it possible for us to experience life as God intended from the beginning. His resurrection declares for us that we don't need to be afraid of death. He overcame it, and so will we. Our faith in Christ gives us peace about the future. Eternity with him is our inheritance. We are blessed indeed because God kept his promise of doing something new with his people.
Jeremiah reminds us of the place in which God would do something new. In Jeremiah 31:33, he identified it as the heart. Of course, mentioning the heart in those days meant talking about the center of a person's being, the core of his or her life, the wellspring of life itself. Down in the core of a person's life, God intended to do something new. He intended to plant his law there. Instead of writing it on stone, like he did on Mount Sinai, he would script it in the hearts of the people who followed him. There it would have a definite effect. It would be the beginning of something new.
Has God shown how he can do something new among his people by working their hearts? Absolutely! He has demonstrated the way he can transform a person from inside out. One changed person affects another person until an entire city or country is affected by what God's doing in their hearts.
In the January 12, 2008, issue of The New York Times, an article was published about the retirement of a minister. What's interesting about the article was that the minister was the pastor of St. Nicholas Church in Leipzig, Germany. The story in the article recounted something that had happened at the church and in the city on October 9, 1989. What happened then and there reflects well on how God can do something new in the hearts of his people.
In 1982, the minister began leading prayer meetings at St. Nicholas Church in Leipzig on Mondays. The exclusive purpose of the Monday night prayer meetings was to pray for peace. Having grown up in Leipzig during a time when the city was under Communist rule, the pastor knew about the tension among the people and the East German government. Leipzig happened to be his hometown. He studied theology at Karl Marx University. Before the iron curtain fell, it was called the University of Leipzig, a fine school with a long and rich history. He also learned Greek and Latin there. At the same time, he worked summers in a car factory and rode his motorcycle around the city delivering telegrams. He also worked as a train waiter. Through these jobs and his university experience, he could hear what the people were actually saying about the oppression imposed by the Communist government that ruled with an iron hand at that time.
The pastor's name served as a self-fulfilling prophecy. Christian Fuhrer came to be a fitting name for the pastor. Of course, he was a Christian. And in the German language, the term Fuhrer means leader. The term had been tarnished by the abuse associated with Hitler. Pastor Fuhrer redeemed the term by leading the people to embrace freedom instead of totalitarianism.
Pastor Fuhrer had been influenced as a child by the example set by Jesus. He noticed that Jesus cared for the powerless, the outsiders, and the neglected. As a pastor, he started the prayer meetings with the hope that his church would reflect the care of Christ for the disenfranchised. He dreamed that it could be a place in which the people in Leipzig could talk about and pray for peace. Little did he know when he started the prayer meetings that they would be associated in due time with the collapse of the Berlin Wall.
Starting in 1982, the prayer group met every Monday at his church. The historic Protestant church in the middle of the city became a focal point as the prayer meeting group grew over time. And for Pastor Fuhrer, the prayer meetings helped him to engage his congregants in something that would address the struggles they faced under Communist rule.
In February 1988, the pastor invited fifty people who advocated the right to leave East Germany to join his Monday night prayer groups so they could talk about the issue. About 600 people showed up, including the participants in his prayer group. In May of that year, the police blocked traffic to the church in fear that the crowd had grown too large. When they blocked the traffic, they thought they had put an end to what they feared would be an insurrection.
The barricade didn't stop the people from coming to the church. It had quite the opposite effect. The crowd grew as people attended regularly each Monday night with lighted candles in hand. Pastor Fuhrer encouraged them to carry candles because it would require both hands. With both hands occupied to keep the candles lit while walking, the temptation to pick up a stone and throw it at the police would be diminished.
The Monday night prayer group of a few people grew. One night a crowd of 70,000 people gathered and engaged in a non-violent demonstration. It came to be called the Monday Demonstration on October 9. Pastor Fuhrer urged the people to refrain from violence at the demonstration. Prior to that night, the police had brutalized and threatened the participants who attended the prayer meeting. However, by that time of the October 9 meeting, the police didn't stop it, probably because they couldn't or perhaps they favored the stand the people were taking -- a stand regarding the need to be free from Communist rule.
The next Monday night, 120,000 people showed up for the demonstration, candles in hand. Things happened quickly after that night. On November 9, 1989, the Berlin Wall fell.
According to an article in Ecumenical News International dated April 30, 2009, the Communist party leader Horst Sindermann lamented the collapse of his government in the wake of the Monday demonstrations. In his lamentation, he confessed, "We were prepared for everything, but not candles and prayers."
Pastor Fuhrer led the people to carry candles and to pray for peace. With the candles in hand, they couldn't give in to the temptation to be violent. With prayers in their hearts, they overcame the fear for their lives. In prayer, they availed themselves to God who would do something new in their hearts.
Some political scholars say what happened wasn't a spiritual renewal. Rather, it was only a political demonstration. When you think about people walking into the face of their fear every Monday night, you have to conclude that their hearts had been stirred, but not by political speeches. Their hearts had been stirred by the Lord who is always eager to do something new among his people if we allow him to do it.
Jeremiah's prophecy promises us that God's in the business of doing something new in the hearts of his people.
It also promises that God's ready to help people have a change of heart, the kind of change that can last into eternity. He is willing to do something about the sin in our hearts.
Through Jeremiah's prophecy, God told the people of Israel that he would forgive their sin and blot out any memory of their sin (v. 34). He made this promise to them in keeping with his pledge to do something new in their hearts. By connecting the removal of sin with the renewal of their hearts, God demonstrated that he considered sin to be a serious problem. Also, he validated his desire to do something about it.
One of the primary leaders of the Protestant Reformation had his struggle with sin to thank for the way God changed his heart. Of course, we are talking about Martin Luther. The awareness of his sin troubled him throughout his young life, and his dread fear of God drove him to find a way to deal with his sin.
On July 2, 1507, for example, he encountered a terrible storm that frightened him into becoming a monk. He devoted himself to being an obedient monk and did everything he could to please God. But all the while, he grieved over his sin. He couldn't find any way out of his sin condition. The law of God convicted him, the wrath of God frightened him, and the righteousness of God angered him. Frustrated, he could hardly endure his awful situation.
Then God in his great mercy pointed Luther to Romans 1:17. There he saw that a righteous person lives by faith. He understood that he couldn't get rid of his sin himself and that Christ has already paid the price for his sin. He grasped that his only response to Christ's gift of salvation was to receive it by faith. That's when he was born again, born from above. His heart was transformed by God's grace in Christ and his response of faith. He lived out Paul's statement that we are saved by grace through faith (Ephesians 2:8).
From that moment, Luther's work took on new meaning. For the next 25 years or so, he devoted himself to proclaiming what it meant to live by faith. His passion for his work got him into more than a little trouble, but he didn't back down or recant. His devotion to God's word prompted him to translate the entire Bible into the German language. Although he spent his life in the little town of Wittenberg, his influence was felt all over Europe. In time other reformers would join him in his work.
What prompted him to make such a monumental impact on his world? Was it a desire to leave a legacy? Was it selfish ambition? Was it awareness that he had a unique message that people wanted to hear? No! He was moved by the Christ who had forgiven his sins and had transformed his heart in the process.
In fact, history shows that many reformers didn't set out to make names for themselves. Like Luther, they simply wanted to share God's gracious message of salvation by faith in Christ. Their Christ-centered message sparked a firestorm time and again in the hearts of people who listened to them. By pointing sinners to Jesus as the only way of salvation, they kindled a spiritual fire that swept their land.
Again, why did they share such a flammable message? Only one reason makes sense. They had experienced the radical change of heart associated with God's grace and mercy in forgiving them of their sins, blotting them from his memory forever. They were compelled to pass the gospel of Christ along to others who ached over their sin as well.
The reformation that gave Martin Luther a place in history books wasn't confined to his native land. It spread beyond the borders of Germany to other parts of Europe. Soon evidences of it showed up in Great Britain. Preachers in that country began to proclaim salvation by grace through faith, and the result was a spiritual awakening that shook that part of the world. In due time, the message of spiritual transformation made its way to the new land of America, and with it came revival. From one coast to the next, the grace of God shown in Jesus Christ has set people free from their sins.
Spiritual transformation isn't only something we talk about in past tense. It's a present reality in many parts of the world today. News from Central and South America, for example, gives us encouragement that the good news of Christ has invaded nations that have been closed by political decree. In Asia and Africa, growing numbers of people are experiencing spiritual transformation as the gospel of Christ is being presented. Other places around the world report the same good news.
Here in the United States, reports of spiritual awakening in some of our cities have been circulating for a while now. God has been changing hearts and transforming lives in places in which we thought he would have given up long ago.
Now to the questions before us. On this Reformation Sunday, what can we say about what God is doing among us? Is God showing that he's doing something among us that's making an eternal difference to anyone?
God's always in the business of doing something new among his people. And we are his people through Jesus Christ. Amen.
