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Freedom and Destiny
A sermon by Dr. Jesse
Fletcher
First Baptist Church, Richmond, Virginia
Sunday, September 9, 2007
Text: Ephesians 1:3-12; Romans 8:29-30
What a special blessing for me
to be back here. I've already divided you into two groups - those of you who
could have been here when I was here and those of you who couldn't have possibly
been here when I was here.
And there are a lot of both of
you. This church was very special to Dot and myself and our children. My son
and daughter both found Christ here and were baptized in this baptistery. Our
lives were nurtured here during the years we spent here with the then the
Foreign Mission Board. I taught the Sanctuary Bible Class which met right down
here in earlier days, and I've had so many people come up who were members of
that class that it's really been special.
To see so many of you that I
have known for years past, Sitting over here, I can look directly up there to
Bud Hamilton and remember lots of great golf games. And dinners, by the way.
And I miss Edith. Right below him is Truman Smith. Truman was my colleague, my
good friend, and I was best man in his wedding. It's the only time I've ever
been designated best man.
So it's still a special
memory. Truman, good to see you. And unless my eyes have completely deserted
me, Elmer West is sitting back there. He is the guy that brought me to Richmond
more years ago than I think I ought to mention. So it's good to be back. If
anybody ever tells you nostalgia is not what it used to be, don't let 'em.
Don't believe 'em. It is.
And then I owe you another
thanks. In the process of being invited to come be your fall interim, I thought
what a wonderful compliment that was. But I thought about Abilene to Richmond
every weekend and I decided that's what it was - just a nice compliment. But I
said, "I really ought to pray about it." Mistake, mistake. When you start
asking God about things, you are liable to hear. And I did. And I realized
that not only did I want to come back but I should come back. And so, it
provided for me a spiritual searching that in the words of one of your recent
preachers, gave me a fresh sense of the Lord's presence and I thank you for
that. I was worried a little bit about the arduous commute. This is hurricane
season in case you didn't know it and there is one of them already kinda'
looking at us. Elmer, you may remember the one at Old Point Comfort that passed
right over us.
And I got to thinking, "I
don't know whether I will be there all the time" so I talked to the staff, I
said, "I need a staff person ready to preach every Sunday. And, they agreed to
do that. So one of them...
and they decided they didn't
want me to know which one it was. But I decided any church whose Minister of
Music can out-preach most preachers I know, is o.k. Ready to go. So here we
are.
If you have your New
Testament, I am going to be reading from the book of Ephesians, Paul's letter to
the churches in Asia Minor that was marked Ephesians though circulated probably
among all of the churches he had helped found there. We're going to look at the
first chapter, and I am going to be reading from Peterson's translation, "The
Message." He's done a wonderful job coming out of a pastor's heart of taking
the Greek into language we can understand and it makes sense in our day and age.
Beginning with the third
verse, "How blessed is God! And what a blessing he is! He's the Father of our
master, Jesus Christ, and takes us to the high places of blessings in Him. Long
before He laid down the earth's foundations, He had us in mind, had settled on
us as the focus of His love, to be made whole and holy by His love. Long, long
ago, He decided to adopt us into His family through Jesus Christ. What pleasure
He took in planning this. He wanted us to enter into the celebration of His
lavish gift-giving by the hand of His beloved Son.
Because of the sacrifice of
the Messiah, His blood poured out on the altar of the cross, we are a
free people - free of penalties and punishments chalked up by all our misdeeds.
And not just barely free, either. Abundantly free. He thought of everything,
provided for everything we could possibly need, letting us in on the plans He
took such delight in making. He set it all out before us in Christ, a
long-range plan in which everything would be brought together and summed up in
Him, everything in deepest Heaven and everything on planet earth. It's in
Christ that we find out who we are and what we are living for.
Long before we first heard of
Christ and got our hopes up, He had His eye on us, had designs on us for
glorious living, part of the overall purpose He is working out in everything and
everyone." And I want to save the next two verses for later.
August 1st, if I remember, the
evening news was galvanized by the story that a bridge on I-35 West in
Minneapolis over the Mississippi River had collapsed. I know that bridge well.
I spent 12 years being in Minneapolis at least once a month and often my trip
took me right over that bridge. I could imagine it and I could almost feel what
it must have been like to have the world drop out from under you. Hundreds of
people were involved. Too many were tragically lost. Others wondrously saved.
There were heroics, there were amazements, and there were also ironies because
we quickly began to hear stories of people who ordinarily were on that bridge at
that time and for some reason, that day they weren't. And people who never went
that way. And one of them that was lost in it chose by circumstance to be there
that day. Interestingly, two of the networks, the one that's led by Gibson,
Charles Gibson, and the other one that I think Brian Williams leads, reported
this story while referring to a novel from the 1920's, Thornton Wilder's "The
Bridge of San Luis Rey." It won the Pulitzer Prize in 1928 and very few people
now have heard of it. When I was a much younger man, you often referred to it.
But it was all of a sudden so relevant that it was scary.
And each of these men tried to
talk about it because "The Bridge of San Luis Rey" talked about an 18th Century
bridge in medieval Peru that collapsed and took five people to their deaths.
But they were five people from such disparate situations.
And it seemed so amazing that
those five would be there at the moment that bridge collapsed. So Wilder wrote
a story in which his hero was a monk named Brother Juniper. And Brother Juniper
was so caught up by this tragedy that he set out to try to understand each of
the five people's lives, what went on in their lives just before, and what could
have possibly brought them together at that moment that would cost them their
lives. He felt that if he could understand that, he would understand how God's
destiny worked. Finally, he finished. He submitted his book. It was written
and printed and he submitted it to church. The Inquisition looked at it and
they burned Brother Juniper's book, and then they burned Brother Juniper. I
hope to fare better discussing that with you today. But it's relevant to being
in Christ.
As Paul points out in this
letter, we are involved in Him in purpose. In purpose that stretches across the
time-space continuum, in purpose that involves things that we not only can't
foresee but things that have already happened whose consequences are still to
unfold.
He referred to this truth,
this concept of an unfolding dynamic purpose in our life, briefly when he wrote
the Romans about five or six years earlier. He was saying to them, "In all
things, God works together for good to them that love God and are called
according to his purpose." Now, he comes back to revisit that idea. Only, he's
much more expansive. He's, he's fleshing it out and I think he was fleshing it
out from his experience.
I think he was saying that the
things that God had taught him in the meanwhile gave that far more meaning than
first he thought. He was writing this, the book of Ephesians, from prison in
Rome. Whereas before, he had been just writing the Romans whom he had not met,
to inform them of things of the faith that they needed to know.
Now, he was sharing it from
the life of one who had lived it and discovered God is at work in our lives.
You don't have to look far to find people who scoff at this.
Probably at no time in my
lifetime have I seen as an aggressive a secular reaction to this kind of faith
and to the idea of God and God in our lives through Jesus Christ as I am seeing
today.
And these are able, educated,
insightful, learned people who are mounting this assault. I don't know whether
any of you have read Richard Dawkins' book, "The God Delusion" and he comes from
a scientific background, basically coming at it from the insights that have
developed around quantum physics and biology and our understanding of life and
the universe. But he comes up with no God and certainly no sense of purpose in
our lives. Christopher Hitchens is another one in his book, "God is Not
Great." He, never the less, in his book, gives me the greatest statement of
faith I've ever run into.
At one point, when he feels
like he's shot down all of the straw men that you could ever raise about the
nature of faith and about our attachment to revelation, he says, "Ultimately,
all you people have is faith." And I wanted to say "AMEN."
That's what it's all about is
faith that God is and is the rewarder of them that diligently seek him. And I
might add, follow him and trust him.
The disillusion, however,
sometimes mount a even greater attack on the idea of purpose because you see,
those of us who believe can often find ourselves in situations that seemingly
threaten to destroy our lives and our faith.
I grew up with a man I'll
simply call by his first name "Norris." We were good friends, fraternity
brothers, we hunted and fished together, we aspired together, he went to the
University of Texas and I went to Texas A&M. I guess he couldn't get into Texas
A&M. Had to settle for the other. But he wanted to be a doctor. And his
parents, he was an only child, wanted him to be a doctor. And this was their
dream for him.
And as soon as he graduated,
he tried to get in medical school and was unable to do so. It was a devastating
blow to him. I saw him afterwards and he was just struggling with it. He
joined the Navy and served four years or so as a Navy officer, then came back,
went back to school and tried it again, and did not make it, and made an attempt
on his life that took a great deal of his sharpness away from him, and later
another attempt that was successful. I'll never forget the disillusionment of
both Norris and his family when his plans didn't work out. They looked to me,
by then a young minister, for answers. I struggled to find them. I wasn't wise
enough, hadn't lived long enough, to try to say disillusionment can sometimes be
the door to wisdom and it may have meaning you are yet to discover.
I think it was in November of
last year, there was a story about a Southern Baptist Convention chaplain in
Iraq in Newsweek magazine. Some of you may have read that. His first tour of
duty ended up with him putting ice in the body bags of these fallen comrades to
preserve the remains in the horrible heat they were in. And he talked about the
terrible toll it took on him when he would look at the faces of men he had
prayed with that morning for safety and well-being and now he was looking at the
remains of their destroyed bodies. A second tour did him in. He wrote in his
journal, "I hate God, and I hate people who say they know what God thinks or
wants or is doing."
He was brought back after that
second tour and assigned to Walter Reed Hospital. I think where he's still
serving. And it was there, working with the wounded, who were also looking for
life beyond that war, that he began to get his faith back.
But the story closed with him
simply saying, "I'm much more candid with God now." All of us can be.
In fact, it's in that
candidness, in that willingness to face what these things mean, that we might
discover that God's purpose is dynamic and unfolding, and as I read this
passage, that's what I see.
One reason you, if you will
compare this passage to some of the earlier translations, you'll notice two
words, in fact in Romans 8 the other two times these two words are used, they
are gone. Words were 'predestination.' The reason Peterson doesn't use them,
the reason some others don't use them is predestination was a fixed notion. And
we now realize God's purposes are very dynamic. It's one of the reasons we can
be free and still have an unfolding life that God has planned for us. It's a
totally different concept.
We're told by science that all
life forms are self-organizing. But when you are spiritually enlivened, that
self-organization is going on, absorbing whatever happens including your
mistakes, and trying to help work you into his purpose. I remember an earlier
author once wrote a book and called it simply, "Crowded to Christ," and
sometimes circumstances do just that. But as you read this passage, several
things will come to mind.
But let me call a few of them
to mind in a way that hopefully you can remember them. First of all, he is
talking that God does work with each one of us. Now, if you are a believer, I
am talking about you. If you believe that God was in Christ reconciled in the
world unto himself and you have embraced that promise, then I am talking about
your life and the things going on in your life and the things that have gone on
in your life, and the things yet to unfold. God works with us personally. He
knows us by name.
This author goes on and spells
out, "He had us in mind. He decided to adopt us."
There is that personal sense
that he weaves all through this translation that's in the original. He knows
you by name. Remember the power of a little TV sitcom called "CHEERS" 'where
everybody knows your name.' God knows our name.
One of the wonderful things
about being in a congregation like this and having the kind of years that Bud
has - Bud, you are what? a hundred and two or three now, or something like
that?
Bud, I read the other day
about a lady that said that she had just celebrated her 104th birthday and she
was interviewed and they said, "What do you like about being 104?" and she said,
"Lack of peer pressure."
One of the things about being
in a fellowship that long is people know your name. And you know theirs. But
God knows our names. And he works with us personally. He works with us
preemptively. This is the most interesting thing.
Long, long ago, the author
translates this passage.
"Before we even hoped," he
says, "God had focused on us and fixed on us, had put in motion goals and hopes
and dreams and plans for our life." That's pretty exciting.
You say, "How can he do
that?" He uses the term "deepest heavens" here - could he have even imagined
what the deepest heavens are all about?
Astronomy is one of my hobbies
although I wouldn't claim to be an expert in any sense, but I have been on the
Board of Visitors at McDonald Observatory in West Texas for a number of years
and have been privileged to some wonderful seeing. We live in a magnificent
universe that is beyond anything we can imagine. Think of a God big enough to
have that universe. It's a space-time continuum and when we look out there, we
are not just looking out, we are looking back.
One of the few extra galactic
sights I can see with my fading vision is a little fuzz ball called Andromeda.
It's another galaxy just like the Milky Way (which is our galaxy) and when I
look at it, I realize the light I am seeing started toward me two million years
ago. I don't know what it looks like now. It could be gone by now. It could
have collided with some other galaxy by now. They do! The deepest heaven.
But a God for whom all time
and space is a single fabric, the foreknowledge of our lives ought to be a piece
of cake.
Personally, preemptively,
purposefully. Things that happen to us we may at first say "Wow, what a
tragedy." And I play enough golf to know that life is not fair. And I see my
friends all around me.
My last call yesterday was to
a neighbor who has just been diagnosed with ALS and there's not a thing about
that prognosis that's anything but cruel. And yet we started out to pray about
it and she's decided that she's going to look for what God has for her in that
experience and I am going to pray with her to that end. God works with us
purposefully.
We look for the meaning of
things. Things not only that have already happened but things yet to happen.
Because remember this, things
that have already happened have started something that is still unfolding. Not
just the law of unintended consequences, it's the whole concept of
consequences. That out of even chaos, patterns can develop.
Corrie Ten Boom was a person
some of you may remember from years ago. She had survived the Nazi prison
camps. She was a Dutch woman. She came over here and blessed a lot of people
with her insights, but one that really blessed me was she talked about a
tapestry. Said when you look at the tapestry from underneath, you see just so
many little short pieces of material, going off in every direction.
It just looks like a mess and
it doesn't seem to have any pattern. You flip it over and there is the beauty
of it. There is the symmetry of it. There's the pattern and the color that
makes it so special. And often, from our point of view, we see only the loose
ends.
We are assured from God's
point of view that it makes sense. God not only works with us personally,
preemptively, and purposefully, but let's use another "p" and say he's
persistent. Thank God, you are persistent.
He takes everything that
happens to us and according to this passage, weaves it into what our life is
supposed to be. Works all things together for good. Doesn't say all things are
good, but he works all things together for good. That's even more dramatic.
And if you're serious about following Christ, you'll find yourself living with
that reality.
I can remember, Elmer, when we
first got here, we were introduced to something called Programmed Learning. And
you remember, it would kinda' lead you through a curriculum and it would ask you
a question.
Didn't matter whether you
said... had the right answer or the wrong answer. If you had the right answer,
fine, you went on to another question. If you had the wrong answer, you started
going into a series of questions that ended up bringing you back to the right
answer that you missed the first time. So you found out that sometime you went
this way to get there and sometimes, you could go direct.
But it had a wonderful way of
weaving it all in toward the purpose of learning.
How much more does God do that
with the things that go on in our lives?
With the things that have
happened to you?
With the things you are
worried about right now?
With the things you are
reaching for? Or the things you are trying to get over.
Choosing to believe that God
is that kind of God is what freedom really is. Choosing to believe that your
life makes that kind of sense is the freedom we have abundantly in Christ.
Steven Hawking, who is the
great Cambridge physicist, says that the real question in life is for the Grand
Unified Theory - 'GUT' they call it. Grand Unified Theory is somehow to get the
four forces of physics, electromagnetism, the strong and weak forces, and
gravity, to get them all together like they were at the instant of the big bang,
as they say. And he said, "Then we shall know the mind of God."
But I think what Paul is
trying to tell us here and let's see, "It's in Christ that you, once you heard
the truth, and believed in this message of your salvation, found yourself home
free, signed, sealed and delivered by the Holy Spirit. The signet from God is
the first installment of what's coming. A reminder that we will get everything
God has planned for us, a praising and a glorious life, in Christ and in God's
plans for us, we know the mind of God.
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