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Sermon
by Rev. Tommy Allen Deuteronomy 7:7-9; I Thessalonians 5: 23-24
In a
few hours the year 2006 ends and we enter the New Year 2007! As we begin this New Year, it is an
opportunity for us all to recall with thanksgiving God’s promised faithfulness
to us, not only over these past twelve months, but His gracious goodness and
mercy to us from the very beginning. It
is vital that we do this, so that we have a positive God-honoring and
glorifying attitude about what lies ahead for us in the months and years ahead. New
Year’s Day is a time when people make resolutions and re-examine their lives,
their lifestyles, and plan out their next twelve months of living. In that process, we also reflect on the past
twelve months with all of its positive and negative moments and issues. For some it can be very difficult as they
recall the death of a loved one, the loss of a job, the diagnosis of a life-threatening
illness, a strained or broken relationship, or the disappointment of a
shattered dream. But
it also can be a time of recalling some of the best moments in a person’s life:
weddings, births, graduations, reconciled marriages, new job or career
advancements, new friends, healed and deepening relationships, spiritual growth
and renewal, and certainly the excitement and joy of having accepted Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior. The bottom line is that all of us have
experienced a combination of both positive and negative moments this past year.
So
what mindset, focus, or objective are we to have as we look to the next twelve
months and beyond? How
do we anticipate and look forward and make plans to reach new goals as we live
in a time of an ever-changing world and local events that seem so unpredictable
and yet can so dynamically affect the outcome of those plans? As a
Reformed Presbyterian minister, I believe the answer to the first Catechism
question found in the Westminster Confession of Faith gives an excellent answer
to this challenge: Q: “What is the
chief end of man?” A: “The chief end of
man is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever.”
This is a solid Biblical truth that one finds spread throughout the
pages of Scripture from Genesis to Revelation. The big question for us all is: How do we accomplish such a
daunting challenge? I believe
“remembering God’s promised faithfulness” is how we make great strides in
reaching that goal in our lives! Therefore,
it is a vital truth, that: To glorify God
and enjoy Him forever, Christians must recall with thanksgiving God’s
faithfulness in the past and trust that He will be faithful in the future. You
may like to know why I selected this topic and the Scriptural texts for my last
sermon as one of your Assistant Pastors. This is the end of 2006, so preaching about preparation for the
New Year coming is timely. But even
more significant is the fact that this is indeed a transition moment: This church
is in a transition period as the Pastor Search Committee looks for your new Senior
Pastor. The country and the world are
in transition, both in the economic sphere and the armed conflicts sphere. You personally, in many and varied ways, are
in some sort of a transition in your lives.
Jerrie and I are in transition as we begin our retirement after 32 years
of pastoral ministry. Consequently, I
wanted to speak to the reality of these many changes and give us all hope and
confidence for the future as we experience the impact of these transition
moments. There
are a multitude of truths about God and His love for His people found in the
Scriptures about the unconditional love that He so powerfully and infallibly
has for His children. The most significant theological or doctrinal truths that
relates so specifically to that love are the covenants He has made with us, His
people, Israel: Those promises He first
made with Adam, then to Abraham, Moses, Joshua, David, and through the prophets,
which culminated ultimately in the final covenant sealed for all eternity by
the death of His Son Jesus Christ on the cross of Calvary. It
is a wonderful blessing to know the truth
that through trust and faith in Jesus Christ for salvation and all those other wonderful
promises found in those covenants
belong to you: sins forgiven and adoption into God’s
covenant family! Consequently
and wonderfully: God’s covenant promises are the basis for his guaranteed faithfulness. Time precludes me from examining and
discussing all the covenants He made, but the texts for today will illustrate
my point. (Read Deuteronomy 7:7-9.) Note the wonderful truths Moses is recalling: ·
God sought to love you
and chose you for His own. ·
Because He loved you from
the beginning, He swore an oath of eternal love (made a covenant) with our
First Fathers of the Faith, (Noah and Abraham), and He kept that oath! ·
He redeemed the Hebrews from
physical captivity in Egypt and redeemed you from spiritual captivity to sin
and death! He
concludes with these powerful, loving words in verse nine. “Know
therefore that the Lord your God is God; He is a faithful God, keeping His
covenant of love to a thousand generations of those who love Him and keep His
commands.” Praise
the Lord!! God is faithful to His Word
and faithful to His people! He swears
upon His Word that He will be eternally faithful to His beloved children, you and
me! The
Apostle Paul’s words to the church in Thessalonica resounds with this same
positive affirmation of God’s eternal faithfulness to His covenant promises
(read I Thessalonians 5:23-24). Note
again the implications for you and me when Paul says it is God who makes you
holy in His sight, it is God who will keep you blameless because of His promise
to Jesus in John 10: “I give them eternal
life, and they shall never perish; no one can snatch them out of my hand. My
Father, who gave them to me, is greater than all; no one can snatch them out of
my Father’s hand. I and the Father are One.” Thus
Paul can conclude with great assurance: “The
one who calls you is faithful and He
will do it.” In
the covenant God made with Abraham, He promised him that his spiritual
offspring would be as numerous as the stars in the heavens and the sand on the
sea shore. God reminded Abraham, Moses, and Joshua that He would never leave or
forsake his dear children. Jesus
promised us He would be with us always.
What immutable, unchangeable promises from God Himself! His covenant promises are eternally
guaranteed for every generation that lives and dies until Jesus comes back to
issue in the new heaven and new earth.
Always, in every circumstance, forever and forever, God is 100% lovingly
faithful. God is a covenant keeping
God! Eternally faithful! What
great, encouraging Good News as we go into the New Year 2007 and the years
beyond! While having the sure word of
God Himself to attest to His faithfulness is certainly proof enough to enable each
of us to enter the New Year with great confidence, peace and hope and joy! But
at the same time for us human beings, sinful and skeptical as we can be at times,
it can also be true that evidences of God’s
faithfulness in the life of the church and our individual lives attest to the
powerful reality of his covenantal blessings as well. The historic reality of God’s faithfulness to this body of His church, First Evangelical Presbyterian, is practical evidence of the presence of his covenantal blessings amongst us. From the very first moment worship services were held in that first building in downtown Renton in the late 1800s, members of so long ago witnessed God’s faithfulness. Over the subsequent years, through thick and thin, through two world wars and the Depression and internal and external enemies of the body of Christ, our church flourished and moved forward as a beacon of gospel light in this area of the Puget Sound. Most importantly, His faithfulness was evidenced in the quality of spiritual leadership that He raised up and His providing pastors that were faithful to the Word of God. That obedience to the commands of God enabled that community of covenant believers to take a bold stand for the deity of Jesus Christ and God’s Word in the early 1980s that led to an exodus and regrouping that culminated in the building and completion of this sanctuary and the ministries that now flow from it to the community and the world. God has powerfully evidenced His
faithfulness to you, His covenant people,
here over these many years. You all are very blessed to be recipients of this
outpouring of God’s faithfulness and I hope this reminder will increase your
faith and hope during this transition period as God raises up another faithful
man of God to be your Senior Pastor. Having
had the very great privilege and honor of ministering amongst you as Interim
Pastor before you called Dr. Jeremiah and over these past nine years as an Assistant
Pastor on staff I have observed that God’s faithfulness has been vitally and
powerfully evidenced in the lives of
you individually and in your families. One of the richest blessings God
pours out on a pastor of His people is the privilege the pastor has to enter
into the deep inner soul of those he counsels. In those very sacred moments as
the Holy Spirit both oversees and interacts in the counseling process, I have
seen God change hearts, give wisdom and supernatural counsel that results in
marriages saved, families healed, fear eradicated, hope renewed and disillusionment
and fear replaced by life-changing joy and peace. I have been involved only with a small percentage of this
congregation, so I know that our covenant keeping God has faithfully worked
similarly in many other lives bringing the same healings and blessings in great
abundance. I hope you who have
experienced such outpouring of God’s faithfulness will be faithful in trusting
Him more quickly and totally the next time you are faced with a crisis in your
life. This emphasis and reality of God’s faithfulness to His
covenant children is very dear to me and is a strong passion within me. I want to share some personal testimony of
how the reality of that faithfulness in Jerrie’s and my life has shaped our
ministry together. We have been married 46 years and in our thirteenth year
together, God called me into the pastoral ministry. In
my early years, teen years, college years and even early years of marriage God
indeed faithfully preserved me from going in directions that would have been
disastrous for me, our marriage and the family we were raising . Not being
raised in a Christian home, receiving Christ at the age of 13 then thrust into
the culture and religion of the Middle East, never attending church and no
involvement in youth groups, then to a liberal college and then after marriage
serving as a Ruling Elder in three different liberal Presbyterian churches
where they thought asking a new member if he or she had a saving relationship
with Jesus Christ was “just to private and personal a question to ask anyone,”
I could have been easy prey for the enemies of God. But
God was faithful to me and my family. He preserved me and guided me through troubled waters during the
late 60s and early 70s in the midst of the Jesus Movement and the charismatic
movement, God began calling young and middle-aged men to the gospel
ministry. I was one of those men. Thirteen
years into our marriage and with three young children, I left my position at
UCLA and we journeyed to St Louis, Missouri, to attend Covenant Theological
Seminary. God provided for us during
those four years. I was able to pastor a church for three of those years and
then a church in Texas, a church in West Seattle, three years at the Seattle
Union gospel Mission and then here with you at First EPC. Just
as for many of you who have sought to live faithfully for our Savior and have
faced troubling and very hard moments in life, I, too, over these 32 years in
pastoral ministry have similar faced very difficult and trying moments. Times when I have been totally broken,
deeply hurt, and questioning whether I should even remain in the ministry. But, oh, my friends!
In those moments I could relate with the saints of old, the biblical
characters like Noah, Abraham, Moses, David, the apostles and the martyrs of
the church through the centuries who faced major trials and tribulations and by
God’s sovereign grace and faithfulness to his covenant promises I was enabled
to persevere like all of those by the power of the Holy Spirit. Hallelujah!! Hallelujah!! I hope you
see now that your personal testimony of God’s faithfulness in your lives is
another attestation of that reality active and alive today! It is in the remembering of these moments of
God’s promised faithfulness that helps you and me to face whatever God has for
us to face in this life . The Scriptural basis for the assurance of this faithfulness
must be the foundation upon which we stand when confronted with all that
Christians face as we seek to be God’s
witnesses in the world through our Savior
Jesus Christ! The motivation for our
faithfulness to is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever. I
pray for you all that as you mature more and more in your faith through the
experiences and moments God your Heavenly Father has ordained for you, that you will come to
experientially know and rely on exclusively the reality of God’s covenantal
promises to faithfully love you and guide you and preserve you in Jesus Christ
to your life’s end. As we move into
2007 and beyond may we exclaim with great joy and thanksgiving: HALLELUJAH
WHAT A SAVOR and GREAT IS THY FAITHFULNESS!! |