Jesus is a “Yes” to is the promise of God himself. We do not live in a world dominated by the negative, for all the negatives charges laid at the feet of God pale into nothing compared to the one great affirmative answer to those charges that God makes with utter clarity: Christ, and him crucified.
For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten son, that whoever believe in him might not perish but have everlasting life. (John 3:16)
For all the promises of God find their Yes in him. That is why we utter the Amen through him, to the glory of God. 2nd Corinthians 1:20
I want to read something for you. I found it on the internet when I searched on the phrase, “Why I don’t Believe in God.”
It is called:
“Monty Python’s Ode to Creation”
It can be sung to the tune of “All Things Bright and Beautiful,” but I won’t sing it. It Goes:
All things dull and ugly
All creatures short and squat
All things rude and nasty
The Lord God made the lot.
Each little snake that poisons
Each little wasp that stings
He made their brutish venom
He made their horrid wings.All things sick and cancerous
All evil great and small
All things foul and dangerous
The Lord God made them all.Each nasty little hornet
Each beastly little squid
Who made the spikey urchin
Who made the sharks? He did.All things scabbed and ulcerous
All pox both great and small
Putrid, foul and gangrenous
The Lord God made them all.
Is it possible to deny these charges?
Well—the Jews tried. They said that God made a perfect world, A Garden of Eden, absolutely free of of all the perils mentioned in “The Ode to Creation.” God placed humankind in this perfect environment. The problem they say, is that Adam and Eve, the first pair, sinned, and because of their sin, the world fell from its state of perfection. Death—and all the evils associated with death, entered the world through human sin, not Divine malice!
The problem is that many of our peers, and many of our children, and many of our grandchilden can no longer believe that story. They believe that the world was created not in six days, but in six gazalion years. They believe that the world we now have is not so very different from the world as it was created. Indeed, many of them believe that, thanks to technological advances, the world that we live is is now a lot better than it was at creation, a much friendler environment for human beings. In this last, at least, they are most certainly right.
So how can we now defend God against the charges laid down in “Monty Python’s Ode to Creation?”
Are we simply to spend more time on the Genesis story of the creation and fall, pinning our hopes on some new scientific discoveries to back up that story? Many have tried. But their arguments have fallen on deaf ears. More and more people are rejecting the Genesis story of the Creation and Fall.
But there is a better answer to Python’s accusations.
The Moravian missionaries discovered it while serving the natives in Greenland. They found the Eskimos in that land in a terrible state. Other Europeans had already taken them European diseases, and European whiskey, multiplying to a horrible degree the difficulty of their already difficult lives.
Those Eskimos knew this world was hardly a friendly place. At first the missionaries tried to explain the inhospitable nature of the world by telling them the story of Adam and Eve and the Fall. They didn’t listen. They went to sleep during the lectures.
After six months of labor, they had made so little impression on the people that one of the missionaries wrote a hymn of frustration. It goes:
Here toils a little group of men,
Endowed with scanty powers;
And day by day, in blank despair,
They count the dreary hours.
Then something happened. One of the missionaries gave the people of Greenland the Passion History in detail. They told them of the Christ that left the glories of heaven for the bleakness of a fallen and sinful world. They told how he became one of us, and walked many a mile in our shoes. They described how he died on the cross for our sins, and rose again to give us a future and a hope. The Eskimos of Greenland soon noticed the difference. One missionary wrote:
At the story of Adam and Eve they had merely wondered; at the story of the Crown of Thorns they wept; and, sometimes, at the baptismal service, their tears dripped into the font. (Hutton’s History of the Moravian Church, James Hutton, 1922, p. 73)
At that time, the head of our church was Count Zinzendorf. When he heard of the success of the missionaries in Greenland, he wrote to Moravians everywhere saying, “From henceforth we shall preach nothing but the love of the slaughtered lamb.”
It was a fantastic discovery! A discovery that would mark the Moravian Church and Moravian mission from that day to this. But it was actually a rediscovery.
St. Paul made the original discovery. It was sometime after he had unsuccessfully tried the philosophical approach in Athens (Acts 17), that he wrote to the Corinthians saying, “I determined to know nothing among you except Christ and him crucified.” (1 Cor. 2.2)
In Acts 17, the resurrection presupposes a crucifixion. In 1st Corinthians, the crucifixion presuposes a resurrection. It is not “Jesus” whom Paul preaches as crucified, but “Christ.” Jesus was desiginated the “Christ” and the “Son of God” in the resurrection! (cf. Romans 1:4)
Jesus is the Yes to all the promises of God.
1. The first thing that Jesus is a Yes to is the promise of God himself. We do not live in a world dominated by the negative, for all the negatives charges laid at the feet of God pale into nothing compared to the one great affirmative answer to those charges that God makes with utter clarity: Christ, and him crucified. “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten son, that whoever believes in him might not perish but have everlasting life.” (John 3:16)
Jesus Christ is a Yes to God, and a huge Yes to the goodness of God. Jesus not only died for us, he lived and died as one of us, to show us the true heart of God!
2. Jesus Christ is also a Yes to the forgiveness of God. You see, you and I are as imperfect as the world in which we find ourselves. Nothing in this world is as wicked and evil as we ourselves.
Don’t believe it?
Then just read the headlines. Read how men kill their wives, and wives kill their husbands. Read how parents kill their own children, and how children are kill their own parents. And what about Joan Benet?
Not enough? Then just delve into history—read about Stalin, and Hitler, read about the history of the American Slavery, read about the Ma Lai Massacre, or about the kind of treatment that John McCain suffered at the hands of the North Vietnamese. (It is much worse than what he suffered in South Carolina!)
Not enough? Then look into your own heart. What a trip that is! Fred Craddock of Emory Seminary was right when he said, “When we dip down into ourselves, we invariably dredge up that which is unworthy to be spoken of!”
There are some things I don’t want you to know about me. And some things about you I don’t want to know!
Wretched man that I am, Who will deliver me from this body of death?”, asked Paul? His own answer, “Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord! (Romans 7:24-25)
Thanks to Jesus Christ we have a second chance at living. Perhaps I had better say, “another” chance at living, for many of us have used up many “second chances.” We make resolution after resolution, but still we cannot deal with the sin in our own lives.
But Christ deals with it for us. We can remember the sins of our past, but we remember them as if they were committed by someone else. For, As the Apostle Peter says, “Christ bore our sins in his body on the (cross).” (1st Peter 2:24) And, as the Apostle Paul reminds us, “If anyone is in Christ, he, or she, is a new creation, the old has passed away, behold the new has come!” (2nd Corinthians 5:17)
Jesus Christ is the Yes to another Chance! A fresh start! A new opportunity to live! Indeed, this chance is so radical that the New Testament says that it is like being “born a second time,” “born again,” “born from above.”
3. There is a third affirmative to which I would call your attention. Jesus Christ is a huge, gigantic Yes to the new birth.
A man of the Pharisees, named Nicodemus, a ruler of the Jews, came to Jesus by night and said to him, “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher come from God, for no one can do these signs that you do, unless God is with him.”
Jesus answered him, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born “anothen”, he cannot see the kingdom of God.”
Now that little Greek preposition, “anothen,” can be translated two different ways. It can be translated, “again.” It can also be translated “from above.”
Nicodemus understood Jesus to mean the first. He said to him, “How can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter a second time into his mother’s womb and be born?”
Jesus answered, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God. That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit. Do not marvel that I said to you, `You must be born from above.’ The wind blows where it wills, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know whence it comes or whither it goes; so it is with every one who is born of the Spirit.”
Today, lots of people are taking up Yoga. They do it for the health benefits it offers. One man said, “Yoga teaches us how to breathe. It is worth studying just to learn how to breathe.”
How we breathe is not nearly so important as how Jesus breathed. According to St. John, he breathed on his disciples and said, “Receive the Holy Spirit.” (John 20:22)
Scholars call that passage the Johannine Pentecost.
In the book of Acts—chapters 1 and 2, St. Luke describes Pentecost in another way. He tells how a tiny group of terrified people filled an upper room, and how the Spirit of God filled that room like a rushing mighty wind. These people had been with Jesus. They had seen him die. They had seen him alive after death! They had great news for the whole world; but to that point, they had not made even one convert. On that day, after they felt “the breath of God,” more than 3,000 men and women and children believed their witness and claimed Christ.
What was the difference? They were born from above. Their lives were filled with power. They no longer lived life with a great big No, the negative of fear, they lived life with a Divine Yes. And that made the difference.
That has made the difference in the life of many. People come to it in various ways.
Let me give you a few examples. Though I found most of them in E. Stanley Jones book, The Divine Yes, I am recounting them from memory.
A society woman spent her days playing bridge. Her life was empty. She sat down and wrote a letter to Jesus Christ. She wrote in the only language she knew:
Jesus,
Life has delt me a bad hand. I don’t know which card to play. Will you help me to choose the next card to play?
She signed her name.
As she did, she felt as if she had been born from above!
Or what about this, a scientist was a master of facts, but he felt his life was empty. He wrote Charles Kingsley, a Christian author, and said, “I am a man of science, I sit humbly at the feet of the facts. I wish I could find one fact that would help me to believe in God.”
Kingsley wrote back, “The fact you seek is Jesus Christ. Sit humbly at his feet, and you will find God.”
The scientist sat humbly at the feet of Jesus and he knew he had been born from above.
Or what about this. A certain psychiatrist charged $50.00 an hour. His office was filled with patients, but he did not think he was helping them. Indeed, he felt himself in need of help. He asked a pastor what he ought to do. The pastor said, “Get converted to Christ.” The psychiatrist did just that. He felt he was a new man. He slashed his fees from $50.00 an hour to $8.00 per hour. His office was filled and overflowing with people, but he was actually helping them!
It was he who inspired E. Stanley Jones to say, “If the church ever ceases to preach conversion, when psychology is fully biological (fully rooted in who we are as human beings), then psychology will preach conversion!”
Or what about this. Though not a man of faith, a certain doctor was on a special mission to a Catholic hospital that served the waterfront of a great port city. While there he was called upon to attend a warf rat who was dying of drink, and drugs, and of the hard life he had lived. The doctor knew the man was dying. He felt there he was nothing he could do. After examining the man, he said to him, “I can’t help you.” Gesturing to the crufix on the wall of the man’s room, he said, “What you need is Jesus Christ.”
The man took him seriously. He turned his life over to Jesus Christ. Soon he walked out of the hospital. He started to preach Christ. He set up a chapel where he led hundreds to Christ and the birth from above.
Years later that doctor was treating another patient in another city. The man was dying, but the doctor was impressed with his positive attitude. “Where did you get your affirmative attitude?” asked the doctor.
“From a former warf rat who preached in a chapel in a certain port city,” said the man, “he told me about Christ. He found him when a doctor who could not help him pointed the way!”
The doctor was smitten. He had been the man. He took his own prescription. He turned his life over to Christ.
Jesus Christ is a resounding Yes to the new birth, to a second chance at living! You can be more than you are. You can be a work of art! It all depends upon your relationship to the Great Physician, Jesus Christ.
Let me say this: In my role as a Christian Pastor I have known thousands of people reasonably well. The vast majority are far more than they might otherwise have been because of their faith in Jesus Christ.
4. Jesus Christ is a Yes to your life, no matter what stage you are in.
Are you still a youth? The writer of Ecclesiastes says to you:
Remember also your Creator in the days of your youth, before the evil days come, and the years draw nigh, when you will say, “I have no pleasure in them” (Ecc. 12:1)
Young people, it is never too soon to turn your lives over to Christ. I say a prayer for each of the children born here or brought here. I always pray, “May you be as beautiful as you were in the mind of God when God first thought of you. May all the promise of life become realities for you.”
We can help that prayer or hinder it. We help it when we say Yes to Christ as soon as possible. My one regret in life, is that I did not say Yes to him sooner, and with greater enthusiasm.
Are you a young adult? Isaiah has a word for you. In Chapter 40 he writes:
Even youths shall faint and be weary, and young men shall fall exhausted;31 but they who wait for the LORD shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint. (Isaiah 40:30-31)
Not long ago I met a Christian college student. He knew I was a pastor. He told me he was making A’s in college, but he was tired. “I work hard at my studies,” he said, “but I also party hardy and I am worn down by it.”
“You have a choice to make,” I said, “and you know what it must be.”
“You are right,” he said.
Are you at mid-life? Have you had your crisis yet? You probably will. It seems to be a rite of passage. I speak from experience—though I am now well past mid-life! At mid-life everyone must consider four things.
1) We must consider our bodies. We are not young anymore. Our bodies are trying to tell us something. We are running out of youth and running out of time. We hate that.
2) The second thing we must consider is our work. Many of us have not achieved our youthful dreams. That bothers us. We have a hard time letting them go, dreaming new dreams that are more appropriate to us. We are disappointed. We look around us for someone to blame.
3) Most of us end up blaming our families. We blame our parents, or our wives, or our husbands, or our own children. I have heard many a parent at mid-life say, “I could get my life together if it were not for the drag of my own children!” This sounds terrible, but I hear it all the time.
4) And that brings us to the real issue—God. We are disappointed with God. It finally occurs to us that we may not be God’s favorite after all. We say, “God, you have really let me down.” Sometimes we say this with anger, hate, vengeance. Then God speaks, in a quiet voice, a voice so small we can scarcely catch it. God says, “Have I really let you down, or have you let me down? You have used me where it has been an advantage to you. Are you now ready to do things my way?”
Jesus says to those who are at mid-life: “Come unto me, all who labor and are heavy laden. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.” William Barclay translates, “My yoke fits well!”
And what about old age? Is it ever too late to turn to God? Now at fifty I don’t really know where old age begins. I have known 29 year olds going on 70 and 70 year olds going on 29. It is often a matter of attitude. But still, we grow older.
I shall never forget approaching my 25th wedding anniversary. I wanted to get my wife something special—in silver. I looked and looked, but found nothing. Then I walked into the annual Bazaar held by our Women’s Fellowship. I saw a small, walnut rocker made by Gene Greene. My children each had rockers like that, made for them by a friend when they were born. My wife loves those rockers, but they will go with the children. I saw a chance to get her one. I bought it. Then I got a little silver plate, and had it engraved for the back. I put on it the dates of our wedding and anniversary, and a verse from the poem, Rabbi Ben Ezra. It goes: “Come grow old with me, the best is yet to be.” The best is yet to be? That is what I want to believe. We now have an empty nest. Believe me, when two people are still in love, that is filled with possibilities!
I hope our time together is long, still, I know that we must inevitably be parted. Our marriage is strong, but not stronger than death.
How does a person die?
Bertrand Russell, a great man in his own right, none thel ess did not believe in God. He wrote a book entitled, Why I am not a Christian. It is such a challenge to me that I read it annually.
Just before his death, Russell said, “Life is like a bottle of very bad wine that leaves a nasty taste in one’s mouth.”
How sad!
Now here is the Christian response to death.
D.L. Moody, the great evangelist, was preaching on the subject of death. He was moved to say, “Someday you will read in the paper that D.L.Moody, the evangelist, is dead. Don’t you believe it, for at that moment I will be more alive than ever before.”
That’s it! That is the universal affirmation of the New Testament. Life is stronger than death! Jesus Christ is the Divine Yes, the shouted Affirmative that he gives us not only life, and life in abundance, but eternal life!
As St. Paul himself has said:
7 I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith. 8 Henceforth there is laid up for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous judge, will award to me on that Day, and not only to me but also to all who have loved his appearing. 2nd Timothy 4:7-8
Do you think you have been dealt a bad hand? Would you like Jesus Christ to help you choose the next card you play? Are you ready to say Yes to God’s Yes? If so, just email me at the address below. I will be happy to pray for you. Your new chance at living might be just a click away. Of course, I have no power, the power is in your own decision, your own Yes! to God’s Yes!