First Presbyterian Church Of Baton Rouge

This week, as you sit down to a Thanksgiving feast, give thanks above all that you have received the faith once for all delivered, the truth upon which eternal lives can be built. Give thanks for all God has brought you through. Give thanks that the season of your suffering will not endure forever, maybe not even for much longer. The Father, Son and Spirit himself has undertaken to restore you, confirm you, strengthen and establish you. I will give thanks for you, dear ones. Your faith and love are a shining witness and constant encouragement. And may we all say with Peter, even as the turkey gets carved, “To Christ be the dominion forever and ever. Amen.” 

Live as those who are free. Live as servants of God. Endure suffering by entrusting yourself to the God who judges justly. Remember that to this you have been called, because Christ suffered for us, leaving us a pattern of love to follow.

On your own, you were lost, isolated. In Christ, you are a treasured possession. You have been called out of darkness into his marvelous light. So that . . . So that you can now proclaim his excellencies with affection and joy. There’s no going back to the cave. My name is Lazarus, and I live!

So this is who we are: a spiritual temple built of living stones upon the cornerstone of Christ. Our gathering, our faithfulness comprise the church which the world will see. We are joined to him and one another. When we gather, the music soars and the praises rise. When we disperse, we do not lose our connection. We go out still as living stones, part of the temple of Christ, declaring the news of his arrival in the world until we meet again.

Your being remade into Christ, being called as living stones of the New Temple, priests to God offering spiritual sacrifices, is all of grace. Let that truth sink in and bring humility and compassion for the lost. For those who perhaps have rejected Christ, or even just have desired to sit on the fence and live a good enough life to get into heaven, know this. The Lord is just as able to save you as he is for any person in this room, but there is no middle ground with him. You must either embrace and shelter under the cornerstone or you will, as Jesus himself said in Matthew 21, fall upon it and be crushed. Don’t put him off any longer. Don’t harden your heart anymore. This day, this hour has been given to you to turn to him. Won’t you heed the call to become who you were meant to be? Won’t you grow up into Christ?

If you are in Christ, he has planted an imperishable seed in you. A new life grows in you. You’ve been born anew into the person you were meant to be. Only Jesus can do that for us. But if you are in Christ, the work of peeling old scales remains. There are things we need to strive to strip: malice, slander, hypocrisy, deceit and envy. For we have been made new for a purpose: to love one another earnestly from the heart. The old life tastes so bitter. But we who are in Christ have tasted how good he is. Live from that sweetness. Share it with others that the world might magnify our savior with us.

We are the captives. And we are the captors. Our sinful choices have delivered us into permanent bondage to our sinful nature. We’ve enslaved ourselves! But we do not have the power to free ourselves. So God foresaw a plan before the world was made. A man sinned and brought the human race to ruin. A man would have to free the human race. A man would have to arise to break the generational captivity to sin and self. A man would have to come who would be faithful to God’s design his whole life. He would be the obedient child of his loving, just heavenly Father. He would love God with all his heart, soul, mind and strength. His faithfulness would make him the first truly free human being since the Garden of Eden. But more, he would have to exhaust the power of captivity to self-centeredness. He would have to go to where our attempting to be our own gods always leads. He would have to go to utter forsakenness and isolation, to the very hell of separation from God and all human communion. The most obedient man wou

Though for a little while, you suffer trials. But the suffering is brief in light of eternity we will spend with Christ. Trials, suffering, and hardships are like gold in the refiner’s fire becoming purified. Your faith is proved genuine, and this brings praise, honor, and glory to Jesus.

When the church is truly living out of our identity in Christ, we know that we are not really home here. We are fish out of water when our neighbors think the real meaning of life is actually accumulating the most wealth. We do not repudiate material things, we simply hold them but lightly. These are means, not ends; gifts not possessions. We weep when we have losses of property and houses but we never say, “I have lost everything” for everything to us is Christ and he cannot be lost. We speak the common language in the marketplace, yet we know that the language of our homeland--the words of worship, the story of God’s redemption, the precious Scriptures—may well sound like gibberish to our neighbors. We may well live in the same home for decades but we never feel truly home there, for this world is but a stop on the way to the heavenly country. We know there is a higher way than revenge, a more excellent path than the constant jockeying for respect found in the world. We live under the law of love.

In just a few words, Peter expresses the huge paradox of the Christian life. “In this you greatly rejoice, you exult, even though now for a little while you have been grieved with the heaviness of trials.” Rejoice. Grieve. Leaping up with joy. Bowing down with the heaviness of suffering. Both at once. He sounds just like Paul who told the Corinthian church that we are “sorrowful yet always rejoicing” (2 Cor. 6: 9). How can these two go together?

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! According to his great mercy, he has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. It’s easy to miss what’s going on here. Something happened to Jesus in this world of dust and swiftly passing time. God the Father raised the crucified and buried Jesus to new life. Jesus got up from the dead. Now that historical event that happened to that one particular man still has power to change what you feel in your heart, mind and soul, right now. Today. Jesus rose. The same guy, but made new. Risen Jesus was a new creation, a man no longer mortal. Still a man but outfitted for everlasting life. When someone opens their heart to this news, he or she gets made new on the inside. We become a new creation. It’s like getting born all over again, but into a higher, fuller life.

A pilgrim on the journey to God sings out, “I lift up my eyes to the hills? From where does my help come? My help comes from the LORD, who made heaven and earth.” That word for “help” is a beautiful Hebrew word, ezer. It was first used by the LORD when he saw that it was not good for the man to be alone. I will make an ezer for him. Not a maid. Not a trophy. Not a project manager. An ezer. One called alongside to do for us what we could not do alone. A complement. A completer. One who is other than we are. Who has something we don’t have. We are on a journey. The long, long journey of life. The journey to God, our true home. The journey of his mission for us in the world, our true purpose. We will not make it if we look only unto ourselves. Psalm 121 calls us to lift up our eyes. To own the truth that sets us free, “My help comes from the LORD.” Then, only then, can we journey in the depths of joy and peace and hope: The LORD will keep your going and your coming in from this time forth and forevermore.”

Stand on Christ who can strengthen you in temptation. Stand on Christ who paid for your sins completely. Stand on Christ who alone conquered death. Stand on Christ who prays and intercedes for you even now. Stand on Christ who calls all who thirst to come to him and drink of living water, to eat the bread of life. Stand on Christ who promises to never cast out those who truly come to him. Stand on Christ who will lose absolutely none of the those the Father has given him. Stand on Christ who is coming to make all things new. Joash stood on Jehoiada, and so he fell. You are to stand on Christ and live. That is your hope for perseverance. That is your hope in life and death; that we are not our own but belong body and soul, in life and in death, to our faithful Savior Jesus Christ!

We have good news to proclaim. We need to return the name of Jesus, the King of Kings and Lord of Lords to our lips. We need to do it in loving witness to what matters most. We need to rehearse our story, to immerse ourselves in the Word of God so those words come readily to us. We need to engage worship more often and more robustly than ever before that we might strengthen each other as we defy this culture and say to the lies that ‘there is a better way’. If we choose this day and each day to serve the Lord, He will make His appeal through us and citizen by citizen our collective faiths, the aggregate of all of those in Christ, can change the culture.

We depend on each other more than we ever know. Every choice matters. Whether in public or in secret. We can rip away at the fabric of community, or we can strengthen it, build it and grow it for Jesus’ sake. Achan discovered how interconnected we are, especially as God’s people. He ended up sitting on a pile of sin he didn’t really even want. He thought he was a private individual whose choices made no difference to any but himself. Achan did not see how burying stolen stuff under his tent compromised the whole mission of God through his people.