You Shall Have No Other Gods
Pastor Mathew Magera – 3/5/17 – Sermon 214
St. Thomas Lutheran Church, Trufant, MI
To God be the Glory!
Grace and peace to you from
God our Father, from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit.
Amen.
In 1992, a man named Dennis
Lee Curtis was arrested for stealing in Rapid City, South Dakota. When the
police were searching him they found a sheet of paper on which was written the
following code of conduct.
“I
will not kill anyone… unless I have to. I will take cash and food stamps, no
checks. I will rob only at night. I will not wear a mask. I will not rob
mini-marts or 7-Eleven stores. If I get chased by cops on foot, I will get
away. If chased by vehicle, I will not put the lives of innocent civilians on
the line. I will rob only seven months out of the year. I will enjoy robbing
from the rich to give to the poor.”
Curtis
has a sense of morality, but it was flawed. When he stood before the court, he
was not judged by the standards he had set for himself but by the higher laws of
the state.[1]
When we stand before God on
judgment day we will not be judged on the morals that we have set for
ourselves. We will not be judged on that laws that we have chosen to follow or
the laws that we have rewritten to better benefit our lifestyle. When we stand
before God on judgment day, we will be judged on God’s law. Time after time do
we hear about the 10 Commandments. We learn them, relearn them, we might know
what they are, we might not. Some people try to understand them, others will
just ignore them, but I tell you this: God’s Law is not to be ignored. God’s
law is to be honored and kept. We are trust in Him above all things and obey
the commands he gives us. This begins our Lenten journey, listening to the
words of Moses as he brings the Law to the people from God Himself, the very
same Law that will consume Christ on the cross.
When Lane and I were in
Greece last fall, two cities that really stood out to us were Corinth and
Athens. What really surprised me, though I knew I was expecting it, was the
vast amount of religious worship that took place in these two cities. When we
saw the remains of a temple that was dedicated to the worship of Apollo, we
likely saw one nearby that was dedicated to the worship of Athena, and maybe
also a synagogue dedicated to the worship of the God of the Old Testament and
then maybe also a Christian church as well. Of course, it was typical that they
would have all been near each other because they would have been positioned in
the highest part of the city in order to be closer to their particular god but
I could only imagine a number of people all in one place offering praises to so
many different deities.
While we do have a number of
religions throughout the world, the temples that we build in the 21st century
do not center on the worship of an ancient Greek or Roman god or goddess, but
the temples we build center on the worship of more modern gods or goddesses.
God, Almighty God, wanted to create order, but not just order, rather the one
true order, that all would turn and worship the one true God, the God that made
the heavens and the earth, the God that flooded the earth and saved Noah and
his family, the God that freed the Israelites from slavery in Egypt, leading
them through the Red Sea and eventually into the Promised Land. God wanted to
create order out of the chaos of false worship.
God wants our trust to its
fullest to be settled only on the one true God. God is saying to us that
whatever we lack of good things we should expect it from him and that we should
look to him for them. He is saying that whenever we are suffering from
misfortune and distress that we should cling to him. He will give us enough to
help us out of every need, just don't let your heart stray and place trust in
someone or something else. God doesn't want our focus distracted by something
that will not fulfill us and God is showing us that he is the provider of all
things good that we need and desire. If we are to put our trust in God alone
and look only to Him and expect from him nothing but good, then we will receive
it. He is the one that gives us body, life, food, drink, nourishment, health,
protection, peace and all other necessities of temporal and eternal life. He
rescues us from evil. Thus, it should be God alone, from whom we receive all of
that, in whom we place our trust and our faith.
The trouble is, moving on
now how this commandment shows us our sin, we don't put our trust solely on the
one true God. We make our own gods and idols that we worship. For example, we
pick and choose traits of God to worship and throw away the parts we don't
like. We place our trust in money or medication. In doing that we have made an
idol and we are not worshipping the one true God. Luther spends a lot of time
talking about our worship of money and possessions, how we have opportunity to
boast about the amount of money we have yet are protective in its use for fear
that we would find ourselves in a position where it does not exist anymore. He
says, "He who has money and possessions feels secure, and is joyful and
undismayed as though he were sitting in the midst of Paradise. On the other
hand, he who has none doubts and is despondent, as though he knew of no
God."[2]
Very few people are of good cheer and do not complain or mourn when their god
does not live up to its promises. When the medicine doesn’t work, when the
investment bottoms out, when your team loses again and again.
Many things can take the
place of God but I want to address one particular substitute that I think is
unknowingly taking the place of God, particularly in the church. Sometimes I
get asked this question, "so, on average, how many do you worship there at
St. Thomas?" I’d respond by saying something like, “so, on average, I'd
say we worship 1 on a Sunday." You see, it's not the question I don't
like, but it's the way that it is phrased. We worship only one. Everyone
gathered worships one. Still, I wonder if the greatest god in a small country
church is people. Yes, people. I mean, a lot of what we do is based on bringing
in people. We've got a new Pastor, they'll come. We've got a new youth
activity, they'll come. If we try this, they’ll come.
Well, two and half years ago
when I got here, if you were to visualize where we would be right now, are we
close to that? Church attendance is not rising. Those of us that are here are
becoming tired and exhausted. Let me ask you this, would you rather have people
in the pews or have people in the community that know the love of God in Jesus?
Of the two which would you pick? We get depressed when people don't come to
worship and we say that we are depressed because of what those other people are
missing out. However, I am led to believe that we are more depressed because of
the gaping hole in our experience. I think we might be missing out. And we're the
ones who are here.
When I go out and talk with
you, check in with you in your homes and I ask, “what do you think the church
needs that it doesn't yet have?” the most prominent answer I hear is: more
people. And I think I'm not lying when I say that this desire is has been a growing
fear of ours for a while now. I'll hear that if there are no people, there are
no offerings. If there are no offerings there is no church. And I wonder if we
spend more time worshipping the people who are not here instead of the one true
God who is.
We need to recommit
ourselves to the worship of the one true God. He can care for us, the church,
when we are let down. He can console us when we feel like giving up. He can
renew us and we need to let him do it. I think there is a reason Jesus called
this the greatest commandment during the years of his ministry. There is so
much at stake. There is so much hanging in the balance. There is the promised
reward of God's love for those who trust and obey but there is also the looming
consequence for those who don't.
One of the hardest things
for us to understand is how Jesus commands us to keep the Law and yet at the
same time fulfills it for us on the cross saying that we are not bound by it
anymore. Do we have to keep the Law or not? The easiest answer to that question
is that salvation is not rewarded to us by keeping the Law, but the Law is
always on the Christian's mind as good and holy. It is God's Law and nothing is
better than God's law. God's very character, his very essence is within the Law
and so for the Christian heart purely and truly seeking the Lord's face would
want nothing other than to experience God through the keeping of God's Law.
There is joy in following
God's commands but the hope that we have comes from none other than Jesus
himself. In the first commandment we can see a God who doesn't necessarily want
to gloat about what he did for us, created for us, gave to us, but rather a God
who wants us to genuinely lean on him for what we need because he is the only
one who is able to give us what we truly need. And, so with the forgiveness
from our failures that Jesus gives to us on the cross, we are able to have our
heads lifted and sent out ready to try again. As the church it is easy to get
disappointed with decreasing attendance. We're not the only ones out there. What
I want us to really start to see is that just because they aren't in here
doesn't mean they are not the church. Just because they aren't here doesn't
mean the church is not scattered about our community taking on a different form.
We come because we know the value in worshipping God, to receive again the
forgiveness of our sins and to partake in the Lord's Supper. Others are not at
that point. Nevertheless, we should be sent out with hope that the Church is
growing.
While our attendance may not
go up, God enables us to carry the Good News to the people. We can be at ease
that God is growing His kingdom each and every day. Maybe one day those who are
not here will come to church, but our goal should be to be sent out with the
Gospel and share it freely without cost. Don't give out the Gospel in exchange
for someone coming to church, give the Gospel regardless. God's temple is our
body, that's where God dwells. And the good news that we can give to this world
is that God is the only one who can meet our needs, he's the one that can
provide for us, that can lift us up, that can heal the sick and raise the dead,
that can create life, that can bring peace, that can give new life to sinners.
So be encouraged that though we can be caught worshipping those who are not
here that we still have a God who is here that can hear us when we complain,
that can hear us when we are frustrated, that can hear us when we worry, that
can hear us when we are afraid. So we put our faith in God who can do
immeasurably more than we can ask or imagine and he will renew us so that we
can go out into this coming week confident, obeying his command and trusting in
his ability to reach the lost with the outstretched arms of His Church who
embrace them and give them the hope that is Jesus Christ our Lord. To God be
the glory, now and always. Amen.