In the Name
of the Father and of the X Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Grace
and Peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ and may our Lord
and Savior sanctify you in the truth, for His word is truth. Amen
The First Sunday in Advent (2011)
Learning
to Wait for God
Psalm 25:1-4 (ESV)
To you, O
Lord, I lift up my soul. [2] O my God, in you I trust; let me not be put to
shame; let not my enemies exult over me. [3] Indeed, none who wait for you
shall be put to shame; they shall be ashamed who are wantonly treacherous. [4]
Make me to know your ways, O Lord; teach me your paths.
As the banner declares, our Advent
prayer asks, “Come, Lord Jesus.” Thus our prayer is a most fervent prayer of
Invitation to the Lord. However, there are other ways to say, “Come.” You might
say, “You really must come by and see us sometime.” However, you only say this
when you don’t know what else to say. The couple you just met seemed nice, but
it was obvious you had nothing in common. Thus you didn’t mean a word of your
invitation and they knew it. Moreover, you would most likely be highly
embarrassed if they ever stood at your front door waiting to be invited in. To
act this way is un-Christian; therefore, Christians should make every effort to
curb such insincerity even if it is the socially accepted thing to do.
Sometimes our “Come” is in the form of a plea. Have you ever heard a distressed
mother trying to call a physician to the bedside of her sick child? Totally indifferent
to politeness or formality, she screams “Come!” She’s not thinking of anything
but the need of her child. However, unlike the distressed mother who shouts her
plea of “Come,” our “Come” addressed to God is often only a whimper or a
whisper. Typically, our “Come” to the Lord is more of a thoughtless, insincere
invitation than a passionate plea of necessity. However, today’s Introit, like
the whole of our Advent worship, is meant to stimulate us to be people wanting
God in our presence; people who truly sense our deep need for Him, for His love
and mercy. Advent worship is meant to make us people who wait expectantly for the
Lord to come to our aid, now, today, in our battle against sin, death, and the
devil. Therefore, with the help of the Holy Spirit, let us today be Learning to Wait on God.
To understand our need to Learn to Wait on God, we need to examine more
closely today’s Introit; herein lies an example of what it truly means to wait
for God. The author of the Psalm which makes up today’s Introit was King David;
he had an acute feeling of the need for God. Listen to the striking expression
he gives to his need: “To you, O
Lord, I lift up my soul” (v. 1). What a picture! Can you just imagine a
man so broken by despair that he stands stretching up on tiptoes to hold his
desolate inner self up before God! He is like a child holding a shattered toy
up to his father for repair. Then ask yourself, “Do you feel this kind of need
for God?” Are you beyond despair, knowing there is nothing you can do to repair
your sin-broken soul; yet knowing that God can? Caught in this moment of pure
honesty you rely completely on God’s faithfulness and
you trust His promise, asking Him to “Come” into your life and cleanse your
soul from sin. If this has happened to you before or even this morning after
the Introit, then you and King David are kindred souls, brothers and sisters in
Christ Jesus. David continues:
“O my God, in
you I trust; let me not be put to shame; let not my enemies exult over me” (v.
2). This is a daring plea indeed. Can you
imagine anyone being ashamed of God? Would you talk that way to God? Would you
say, “O Lord, I don’t want to have to be ashamed of You,
so come to my aid?” This is exactly what
King David is saying. He had put all his eggs into one basket, and that basket
was God’s promise of deliverance. He was risking everything on his trust that
God would respond to his plea for help. If God failed to come through, how
ashamed he would be! He could even picture his enemies singing a triumphant celebration
and laughing over this broken wreck of a religious man who had counted on God
instead of relying on his own resources—and lost. Here is a man who understood
in the depths of his spirit the deep yearning that comes from a sense of need
for God. For you and me, God has fulfilled His promise to send us a Savior;
therefore, we can trust Him implicitly. He has not and will not put us to shame
and in His Son, Jesus Christ, He has destroyed the only enemy who would destroy
us; death.
The purpose of
Advent is to stimulate in us this sense of expectant waiting for the God who
comes. Advent worship is geared to make us tense with expectancy. For some it
seems strange that we would seek that which builds up tension on purpose. Usually
we’re concerned about how to get rid of tension, not how to cultivate new ones.
However, like the tension of a child
looking forward to Christmas, Advent worship builds up within us a good
tension, and expectancy of seeing our Lord “Come”
All you need
to do is look around you to see some of the tension-building signs in our
Advent worship. When you first walked into the church this morning, you saw
violet paraments on the altar, the pulpit, and the lectern. Violet is the Church’s
color of penitence, it is a color displayed to remind us of our sin and our
need for God’s forgiveness. Thus, throughout the season, let the violet of
Advent remind you, “How very much you need God and how worthwhile it is to wait
on Him!” The Collect for today teaches you to pray that Christ will stir up His
power and come that “we may be rescued from the threatening perils of our
sins.” In many churches and homes, the Advent wreath is on display, and in the
Church we build up a sense of expectancy every week by lighting another candle
during the Advent season. All this is to help you to be waiting people who want
God to “Come” because only God can rescue you from the eternal catastrophe your
sins have plunged you into.
We need the
very thing Advent offers. Truth is we don’t always wait for God, much less wait
for Him with the passionate sense of need we ought to feel. In the Introit
today, King David cries out, “To you, O Lord, I lift up my soul” (v. 1).
When you pondered these words of the Introit at the beginning of today’s
worship service did you really beg with passion that God would come to you? Or
when you listened to the Collect fervently pray; “Stir up Your power, O Lord,
and come,” was this, for you, only a halfhearted cry? Sometimes our sense of
need for God ebbs so low that the Gospel itself sounds dull and uninteresting
to us. We become consumed by the toils of everyday living and the excitement of
life; easily forgetting our need for a compassionate and loving God to “Come”
and rescue us from the entrapment of the world. Truth is, it’s not unusual for
people to get far more excited watching a football player run fifty yards for a
touchdown than they do when listening to the Good News about Christ’s coming to
set us free from sin, death, and the devil.
When we don’t
wait for God as did King David, the reason is often that we have become
complacent about sin. Today’s Collect is a prayer begging for rescue from “the
threatening perils of our sins.” To many people it sounds downright
melodramatic to talk about sins as “threatening perils.” Shortcomings, yes;
weaknesses, yes; mistakes, of course—we all make mistakes. However we are
seldom bothered by the feeling that we might do anything which could drive a
wedge between ourselves and God. When we hear about Luther’s deep feelings of
guilt before God, many of us wonder what he could have been talking about. However,
this is strange since we live in a time when many people feel guilty most of
the time.
If you’re sick
and you stay home from work, you feel guilty for taking the time off. If you’re
sick and go to work, you blame yourself for being at the office all day feeling
the way you do. Furthermore, you feel guilty because you might have gotten some
of your co-workers ill. Then there’s the guilt that comes from the use our
spare time. If we use it to do church work, we feel guilty because we should
spend more time with our families. If we’re spending time on recreation, we
feel guilty because the yard is going to weed. If we’re working in the yard, we
keep thinking, “I really ought to be getting more recreation,” and we feel
guilty about that. If some acquaintance doesn’t seem quite cordial today as he
did yesterday, we wonder, “Now what did I do to offend him?” How strange is it?
So many today fell guilty about so much! Yet so little of this guilt brings us
to the reality that our sins are sins against God! King David cried out to God,
“Against
you, you only, have I sinned,” (Psalm 51:4 ESV). He saw his guilt in
its true perspective. Therefore, we pray, that God will grant us the eyes of
faith to see the reality of the devastation of sin; that our sins are
threatening perils; a caustic acid which erodes our relationship with God.
When the
yearning theme of Advent finds a sympathetic response in our hearts; the Gospel
of Advent sounds as thrilling Good News in our ears. Advent means “coming.” The
message of Advent is that God comes in response to our need for Him. “Make
me to know your ways, O Lord; teach me your paths” (v. 4). We begged this from
our Lord in the Introit. Here, King David is not merely asking God to show him
how to behave. Instead, he is asking God to show him the road on which he can
find God coming to him. He asks, “Let me lift up my eyes and see You coming down the path into my life.” Today’s Gospel
Reading gives us a snapshot of God answering this very prayer. If you want to
see one graphic scene that symbolizes what the Christian message has to say
about God, then recall the vision placed in your mind of the events described
in the Gospel Reading for today.
Down a dusty
road into the open gates of
The God who
comes never stops coming to those who learn to wait for Him. Jesus Christ died
on
May the peace
of God, which passes all understanding, keep your hearts and minds through
Christ Jesus. Amen.