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This Is the Day
A sermon by
Dr. James Flamming
Pastor, First Baptist Church, Richmond, Virginia
Sunday, July 30, 2006
Part of a series from favorite Psalms, “Lift Up Your Eyes!”
Psalm
118
I was
a young pastor in my mid 30’s, privileged to pastor a church with great
heritage, a large congregation, many of the members were older than I was which
isn’t hard when you’re in your mid 30’s.
It
occurred to me after I’d been there a couple of years that it would be helpful
if we had a week of revival with an older preacher. I called around and the name
that surfaced the most often was Dr. Clovis Chapel. Dr. Chapel was a Methodist
minister, had pastured some of the large First Methodist churches across the
land and now at 80 years of age had become a kind of a preacher at large,
preached in more Baptist churches than any other and so I was anxious to have
him. I had read his books of sermons and the like.
When
I picked him up at the airport and we were driving to where he would be staying
I wanted to impress him with how organized we were and so I gave him a list of
what we would be doing through the week. There were service clubs who had heard
he was coming to town and they knew of his reputation and had called and said
we’d love to have him speak, Lions Club, Rotary Club, so forth. As I read
through all of those assignments and I finished he said I won’t do that. I
didn’t know exactly what to say. I said well they are really looking forward to
you being there. He said young man when you’re 80 years old you can do what you
want to do or don’t want to do.
I
mentioned that he was scheduled to speak in chapel at the Baptist college campus
nearby. Now chapel there, then, was required and they took roll. To say that
people who were students walked in with something less than enthusiasm is an
understatement. And so I explained to him that there would be student out there
reading newspapers, others studying for the next class, a few dozing here and
there, some will have smuggled in some coffee and he said, “Oh I’d just love to
do that.”
When
it came time for him to speak in chapel we’re walking up to the chapel building
and I remind him that the students are not going to be sitting on the edge of
their seats waiting for him to speak and that they will be reading newspapers
and the like and he smiled at me and he said I know all of that.
Well
when they had introduced him and he stood up to speak he stood behind the pulpit
and then he was just quiet until he got the attention of virtually everybody in
that chapel. You know that does have effectiveness, just be quiet. After he
had their attention he said, “Young ladies and gentlemen I suppose you’re
feeling sorry for a man like me who is 80 years old but,” he said, “I need for
you to know something about me. I wouldn’t be as young and dumb as you are for
anything in the world.”
Well
the papers came down, the books got closed, people woke up. He preached that
morning on Psalm on 118:24. It was a great sermon. After it was over I said,
“I want a copy of that.” He said, “Son,” boy he knew how to put you in your
place. “Son, I have preached that sermon often enough to where I know it by
heart. I don’t need a copy of it. And if I did have a copy of it I wouldn’t
give it to you.”
Psalm
118:24, let’s read it. “This is the day the Lord has made, let us rejoice and
be glad in it.” There are other things about this chapter you might want to
know because it has some favorite verses of early Christians. They reached back
and picked up, for example, Psalm 118:22. “The stone the builders rejected”
that would be of course Jesus Christ, “has become the capstone and the Lord has
done this and it is marvelous in our eyes.” And look down, verse 27, “The Lord
is God and he has made his light shine upon us with boughs in hand join in the
festal procession up to the horns of the altar.” See, the early Christians saw
that as a prophesy of the Lord’s entrance on Palm Sunday into Jerusalem. And
the horns of the altar, they saw that, see in the Temple the altar had four
corners and the horns came up as to indicate sacrifice and the early Christians
said the horns of the altar have become the arms of the cross where the great
sacrifice was made for us. So it’s an incredibly important and beautiful
Psalm. But the key verse it seems to me is verse 24, “This is the day the Lord
has made and we will rejoice and be glad in it.”
Began
with this day, focused, present tense, right now. If you don’t go past that own
it, build a tent around it and say this is mine you’re going to miss the whole
verse because this verse isn’t talking about a whole calendar. It isn’t talking
about something that’s way ahead, no, not yesterday but this day, not tomorrow,
this day, not nostalgia about the way it was back then, no, no, no, today, this
day, not well someday maybe I’ll think about God, today, this day. Not someday
I’ll get around to it just give me time. The psalmist says this day. Not if I
only had time but right now I’m very busy, you just haven’t caught on yet, have
you? The psalmist is saying if it happens, if it happens, if it happens it
won’t happen tomorrow or yesterday it will happen now, today, this day. And it
won’t be someday when everything is just right and everything is in place and no
trouble anywhere and there’s no sickness and there’s no sorrow and nothing has
been going wrong. When that happens then I’ll come and claim the day. That’s
not what it says. It says this day.
I
don’t care what your situation in life is this is your verse. I don’t care how
many times you might have said to yourself well someday I… On this day hear me
and hear the Lord speaking through me and hear the Lord speaking through me
about what he said so long ago this is the day. Now we can treat this day as
any forgettable square on a calendar, a ho-hum day like all other ho-hum days or
we can believe that the maker of heaven and earth is about making this day for
you. See, the word for this is the day the Lord has made, that’s the same word
as Genesis 1 when it speaks of God being the maker, often translated creator,
maker of heaven and earth. So that the same God that was there at the beginning
of creation and stepped out on the brow of nothingness and threw out the planets
in their orbits, the same God who did that is about the task of making your day,
of walking you through it, of creating the next step, of helping you understand
what’s going on in your life.
So
how do we see each day and how do we walk into it? How can we walk into the day
with hope and joy and speak to the Lord about our hearts greatest desires? How
can we walk into the day and share every part of it, the good, the bad, the ugly
with the Lord? How can we make this the Lord’s Day? Because although we speak
of Sunday as the Lord’s Day and rightly so I would hope it’s different than
other days, still there is a sense in which everyday is the Lord’s Day. It
depends on whether we give it to Him and whether we make it the Lord’s Day. How
then can we take a ho-hum day and make it into a holy day? How can we make a
day that can go by just like telephone poles on a trip do you remember any
single one of them? No. What this verse is saying is don’t let your days
become like that. Seize the moment and focus on today. How can you do that?
One way is to imagine.
I
call you right now to imagine you’re standing on the shore and you’re looking
out into the ocean, many of you have been there already this summer. You’re
looking out ankle deep, knee deep, you’re looking out at the water. You’re
looking out at the breakers coming in and you realize how vast that ocean is and
that hundreds of miles past what you can see that ocean is. But the place
you’re standing for right then is yours. That’s your piece of the ocean. And
that’s the way a day is. Everyday is your piece of the ocean of that time. Now
when you’re standing there and you’re looking out at the vastness of that ocean
claiming on the other hand where you’re standing think about all that’s going on
in that ocean that you can’t see. The fact of the matter is what’s going on in
that ocean that you can see is bitty, bitty, tiny, tiny, infinitesimal but it’s
going on. And if you were to go out into the depths of the ocean my what’s
going on there. That’s what’s going on everyday. God is doing things you do
not see and nobody else is seeing but it’s going on and it’s going to matter and
it’s going to be completed. This is the day. Imagine yourself at the beginning
of it like looking at an ocean realizing you can’t possibly see everything
that’s going on but knowing that it is going on.
Another way to prepare for the day is to realize that God is at work within you
through that day. Phillip Keller has written that the ocean is for him a
reminder of God and what God is trying to do with his life. Phillip Keller is
the guy who has written perhaps the most famous book on Psalm 23 but he lives
near the ocean and he loves it. And he goes for a long walk every morning that
he can alongside the shore and he says few indeed are the mornings when I stroll
along this shore that the ocean does not impress with its power and its glory
and its majesty and the sense that it is doing so many things that although I
know it’s happening I can’t see. I am awed by its magnificence but I’m also
challenged that that’s what’s happening in my life and in my world. That there
is so much going on that I can’t see and that God is at work, He’s doing His
thing. When you stand as it were at the beginning of the day you’re standing at
the shoreline of that day and stand there to realize how many things could
happen even though you can’t predict them, control them but you can rejoice in
them. He writes so I am still before its majesty even as I am still before
God. I have a soul that becomes silent when it realizes with anticipation what
God might be doing that day and there is assurance that the ocean will be there
tomorrow just like it’s been there today. It will be different but it will be
there.
Thirdly I think you ought to look at believing in breakthrough days. See all
days are not equal. God is in every day. This is the day can be said of any
day but there are breakthrough days, days when all of a sudden everything comes
together, days when God’s spirit and your spirit meld and are welded together.
I think if you will look back over your life, you who are more mature, that’s
another nice word for getting old. You’ll understand there have been 4 or 5 or
maybe 10 days when you’re life turned the corner and when that happened lots of
other things happened. It wasn’t as if they happened just all at once for God
had been working and now you can see it for a long time before then but then
came the day and it was a breakthrough day.
Donald Miller tells of his friend Laura on a campus of which they were a part.
He was known to be a Christian but he was kind of an irreverent Christian, a guy
who believed but he was more adept at experiencing his experience with the Lord
Jesus than he was being able to explain it. The grace of the Lord, which he had
experienced he tells about in a little book that has its reverent side and the
title you wouldn’t think would be a religious book but it is. It’s called “Blue
Like Jazz”. And on a day as he writes in the book, on a day when he attended a
lecture he chanced to sit right behind a young lady he knew, she had attended
some of the Christian meetings, but she was not one. And after the lecture was
over she just sat there, people were leaving, she just sat there. And he
decided he would just sit there. Finally everybody had gone except Laura and
Donald. He reached over and whispered in her ear, how are you doing? She said
not good. What’s the trouble? Nothing’s going right. What’s wrong?
Everything. Of course, everything, that’s never true as you will see. Boy
stuff? No. School stuff? No. Family stuff? No. There was a pause and then
he said God stuff? And she looked around and said, “Don I don’t know what to
do with this. Don I feel like He’s after me.” “Who’s after you?” “God.”
“Well Laura that’s the greatest thing that can happen to you. Just to think
that God has, out of all of the people anywhere, chosen you that’s, that’s a
great gift. That’s wonderful that God’s chasing you.” And she responded, “Don,
you just don’t understand, you just don’t understand. I can’t get there. It
would be like trying to fall in love when you can’t. It would be like trying to
convince yourself that your favorite food is pancakes when it isn’t. You don’t
decide those things they just happen to you and if God is real He needs to
happen to me and it didn’t happen.”
The
days went by, more days went by and then one night when night when Don was
checking his email there was a letter from Laura and Laura wrote, “Dearest
friend Don I read through the Book of Matthew this evening. I was up all night
and I couldn’t stop reading so I read through Mark. This Jesus of yours is
either a madman or He’s the Son of God. And half way through Mark He was there
and I realized He was the Son of God. Don I guess that makes me a Christian
because He and I got together. Come to the campus tonight and let’s have
coffee. Love ya, Laura.”
You
see there are those God moments when it, how do you explain it? I don’t even
try. All I know is suddenly you and God are there and you and God have gotten
together and the Son of God is no longer on a page but the Son of God is there
in your life and in your heart and in your mind and it’s, it’s a breakthrough
day.
Oh,
if this morning might turn out to be a breakthrough day for you, wow, wow. I
have one more thing to say. If you’re going to make this day God’s Day then
you’ve got to start believing in the value of small things, small blessings that
you receive and small blessings that you give out. Jesus said, now listen to
Jesus here, you say ah, yea, you know, listen to Him. He said the kingdom of
heaven is like a mustard seed. Most of you have never planted a mustard seed.
A mustard seed is tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny. It takes 725 mustard seeds to weigh 1
gram, tiny. And Jesus said the kingdom of God is like a mustard seed but if you
plant it, it will grow up to be one of the largest shrubs. And He said it’s
like leaven, leaven if you put it in the dough it’s about like the end of your
thumb, not big but consider all of the difference it makes. Your day becomes
God’s Day when you pay attention to the tiny things, the tiny blessings and the
tiny gifts you give out by the words you say, the personality you are, the
witness you give, the things you don’t do and the things you do.
Coming out of the Hurricane Katrina is a story about some survivors. One of the
men that told the story; the water kept rising, the levees had broken. It was
very clear that even though he was on the second story of his home that story
was going to be under water any minute. And so with two children on his back he
swam to the highest building in the neighborhood. Others did the same until
they had a little group on that roof. It would be their home for three days
until they were evacuated. And he had been there about an hour when he looked
around and he said I know why this is the highest building in the neighborhood
it’s a church. One of the ladies who had survived and was there said, hmm. The
man said hmm, we’re on holy ground. She said maybe. And she went around,
crawling around, crawling around the roof and trying to imagine and then she
said I don’t live here. I was just visiting but I remember when I used to come
here as a girl. This is the church my grandmother and my grandfather helped to
build and we used to come and worship here. And we worshipped here when they
were building brick by brick, nail by nail and she said who have thought, who
have thought that when they were putting it up someday their granddaughter would
survive because they built the church? It’s the little things, the little
breaks, the single nails, the 2x4’s but someday God takes what we’ve done today
because it’s His day and He’s the maker of it and He weaves it into the pattern
of life so that the blessing we have made turns out to be blessing in ways we
could never have imagined.
Let
me ask you: what does God want to do with your life today? What does God want
to do through you today? What do you need to give to God that He can use this
day? And is it a breakthrough day?
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