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Life: God’s Version of Take Your Child to Work’ Day Week 8 – The Job Isn’t Done, yet! A sermon on Amos 8:4-7
Life: God’s Version of Take Your Child to Work’ Day
Week 8 – The Job Isn’t Done, yet
Amos 8:4-7
† In Jesus Name †
May the grace and mercy of God our Father and our Lord Jesus Christ sustain you, until the work God began in you is completed as Jesus returns!
How do you know the work is over?
As we talk about going to work with God, today we are going to look at the great moment when the job is done.
Or more precisely, how do we know when the job is done?
When we are kids, I don’t think we understand this all that clearly. We might finish a small task and go, “Dad, we’re done!” and think it high time we go and celebrate!
Until Dad lets us know that the little task we had completed was just the first of many!
“But Dad, I filled the wheelbarrow liked you asked, can’t we go now?”
“No son, now we make the concrete with the sand and the cement mix, then we get the rocks and make the wall….”
“but Dad, that will take for—-ever, and I am hungry now…”
“Be patient, there is more hard work to do…. “
So I’ve got a question for you…
As we work with God in this life, are you ready and willing to keep working with Him?
Are you sure? What if the work is hard?
What if the work isn’t just trying to save the world, but you are the object of the work? What if you are the one God is finishing what He started to recreate?
Or we could you hear yourself telling Him, Lord, we finished the work?
The Law ( Oh and is there law!)
The passage from Amos describes God’s message to His people, as He continues to do the work while He walks with them. You see, they messed up the job a little, and caused some delays, and God must…work on them a little.
The passage is brutal, getting right to the point as God points out their sin. God goes right after how they treat their neighbor, taking advantage of them the moment, they walk out the door of church,
“so you can get back to cheating the helpless. You measure out grain with dishonest measures and cheat the buyer with dishonest scales. 6 And you mix the grain you sell with chaff swept from the floor. Then you enslave poor people for one piece of silver or a pair of sandals”
Now, all these sins are against one’s neighbor, but you may be going, whew, those aren’t my sins. I mean when was the last time Nancy mixed chaff with the wheat she was selling someone? Or the last time you used that scale that you knew was off… in a business transaction.
Wait, does lying to the doctor count here?
Or do you “own” some people who went into debt with you?
Or is there something deeper at work here?
The Real Sin, Behind the Sin
One of the problems with Amos is that we don’t recognize the primary sin here, and there fore we can’t recognize the gospel in the passage that deals with the sin.
We look at what we consider the big sins, the ones committed against other people.
Did anyone notice I missed the big sin in the passage?
You can’t wait for the Sabbath day to be over and the religious festivals to end…
Here is the issue—what leads us into deeper sin is our rush to end our time with God and get back to “real life.” The second commandment – to treasure the sabbath day and keep it holy – they couldn’t waste their time finding rest and restoration by knowing God’s love, and instead they wanted to get back to …whatever they thought was more valuable than worship and prayer, than hearing God’s word and communing with Him.
I’ll be honest, there are times when I’ve been distracted by life, and wanted to get moving past some pastor’s conference worship session or end a Bible Study. Sometimes the reasons sound good, other times
And it is that attitude towards God, that point where time with Him doesn’t matter compared to something else, that we begin to act and believe like others don’t matter either.
That is where sin begins, where neglect of our relationship with God
That is what James is talking about, when he writes about God’s law not being a bunch of different sins that are ranked, but rather, “8 Yes indeed, it is good when you obey the royal law as found in the Scriptures: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” 9 But if you favor some people over others, you are committing a sin. You are guilty of breaking the law. 10 For the person who keeps all of the laws except one is as guilty as a person who has broken all of God’s laws. James 2:8-10 (NLT2)
So if God’s going to do the work, on us, with us, wouldn’t it be beneficial if we aware of the work?
Did anyone see it in the passage from Amos?
It’s there!
The Grace, Where We Didn’t See Grace
It’s a challenging discussion, enough so that I wrote several other pastors and Jim and Bob to see if they saw it. Didn’t even sleep on Sunday night, as I could not see the gospel in these verses, something that would give us hope, because of the death, burial and resurrection.
And then I saw it, right there in verse 7,
7 Now the LORD has sworn this oath by his own name, the Pride of Israel: “I will never forget the wicked things you have done! Amos 8:7 (NLT2)
God’s not going to forget our sins! That’s incredible news! In those words, we find the gospel, and it is amazing!
It doesn’t sound like good news, it doesn’t sound like the gospel! That sounds like condemnation! That sounds like every sin is going to be remembered and God will crush us for them….
And if God remembers every time we neglect Him, every time we sin by not loving our neighbor as ourselves, we are in deep doo doo.
But the Hebrew there means that He won’t forget to deal with the sin. It doesn’t say He won’t deal with it, or that He will just right off the one committing the sin. God won’t forget our sin, means He won’t forget to deal with it.
Amos and the people of God didn’t know how God would deal with such sin, they had no idea of Grace. They only knew that sin would get punished…they never saw Jesus taking the punishment we deserve
They didn’t know of the cross.
They didn’t apply Ezekiel 37 and God putting His spirit into the bodies He created from the dead dry bones in the Valley. They didn’t believe he couldn’t save us, and bring back to life that which was dead in sin.
They didn’t realize what we testify to..
Alleluia! Christ is Risen!
(He is risen indeed! Alleluia)
and therefore
(We are risen indeed! Alleluia!)
God indeed will never forget our sin, and He will never forget He dealt with that sin at the cross!
We have to understand this job, God doesn’t do it half way, He completes it, He doesn’t forget our sin, nor will He ever forget He did something.
Which is the point of the prophetic message, to help us realize the promise of Christ, and God not forgetting, but dealing with our sin, at the cross. And because of that death and resurrection, He will never forget He dealt with that sin.
When we know that, the peace of God, which passes all understanding, yet in which we are safe, our hearts and minds, by Christ Jesus.
Do we care enough to ask?
Photo by MIXU on Pexels.com
Devotional thought fo the Day:
19 My friends, if any of you wander away from the truth and another one brings you back again, 20 remember this: whoever turns a sinner back from the wrong way will save that sinner’s soul from death and bring about the forgiveness of many sins. James 5:19-20 (TEV)
Anyway, I would gladly know how things are with your soul. Have you finally become sick and tired of your own righteousness and taken a deep breath of the righteousness of Christ and learned to trust in it.
What a question for Martin Luther to ask his friend George!
Can you imagine me, or any pastor, or any friend asking that question of you? What would be your response? How would you respond?
Maybe I should ask you!
Or perhaps it is isn’t as questionable as “maybe”. We need to ask this question of each other. We need to care enough about people to ask them this, to genuinely care for their souls, for their spiritual needs.
And while I am not exclusively talking about pastors, elders and other church leaders, it starts with us. We are the ones tasked with shepherding souls, with reconciling the broken. This job belongs to the entire church, the caring for souls, whether they are members of our church, or atheists, whether they are our family and friends or our nemesis.
The words of James’ epistle strike this home. if someone wanders away, we bring them back, we cover a multitude of sins, and we save them from death.
As hard as it sounds, we have an obligation to our brothers and sisters, to lovingly help them bring their sins to Christ, to let Him remove and annul them. Not just to look the other way, not to just say, “well, really, except for this or that, Joe was a good guy, good enough to get to heaven.” That is easy, but really, it isn’t loving, it doesn’t call him back to God, it lets him wander through this life. It leaves him bound to self-righteousness, or to the guilt and shame he dwells in.
The church, you and I, have the ability to be there, to assist the prodigal on the way home, to help them know what we should know so well, the words of God declaring we are forgiven. We need to help them do as Martin Luther encouraged his fried George to do, to take a “deep breath of the righteousness of Christ and learned to trust in it.”
Lord, help us not to hide our sin, help us encourage others to be drawn closer to You, to receive your promise of absolution, and to live lives free and forgiven. Help us to be one people, united together in Your presence, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. AMEN!
Luther, M. (2007). Luther’s Spirituality. (P. D. W. Krey, B. McGinn, & P. D. S. Krey, Eds., P. D. S. Krey & P. D. W. Krey, Trans.) (p. 3). New York; Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press.
How and Why do we confront sin?
Discussion and Devotional Thought of the Day:
It is widely reported that there is sexual immorality among you, immorality of a kind that is not found even among gentiles: that one of you is living with his stepmother. 2 And you so filled with your own self-importance! It would have been better if you had been grieving bitterly, so that the man who has done this thing were turned out of the community. 3 For my part, however distant I am physically, I am present in spirit and have already condemned the man 4 who behaved in this way, just as though I were present in person. When you have gathered together in the name of our Lord Jesus, with the presence of my spirit, and in the power of our Lord Jesus, 5 hand such a man over to Satan, to be destroyed as far as natural life is concerned, so that on the Day of the Lord his spirit may be saved. 1 Corinthians 5:1-5 (NJB)
5 If anyone did cause distress, he caused it not to me, but—not to exaggerate—in some degree to all of you. 6 The punishment already imposed by the majority was quite enough for such a person; 7 and now by contrast you should forgive and encourage him all the more, or he may be overwhelmed by the extent of his distress. 8 That is why I urge you to give your love towards him definite expression. 9 This was in fact my reason for writing, to test your quality and whether you are completely obedient. 10 But if you forgive anybody, then I too forgive that person; and whatever I have forgiven, if there is anything I have forgiven, I have done it for your sake in Christ’s presence, 11 to avoid being outwitted by Satan, whose scheming we know only too well. 2 Corinthians 2:5-11 (NJB)
This morning as I looked at facebook, I was a bit in shock at the response of some people to the election of the new leader of another denomination that shares the name Lutheran with my own. We are, in many ways radically different, but the mocking and deriding of their decision was sickening and to be blunt, sinful. Confronting sin, whether just perceived or actual, never justifies sinning in the confrontation of it. What is worse, Luther’s rants were used to justify their own mocking and ranting. Luther’s large catechism was also quoted, talking about the confrontation of sin. Here is the passage used to justify mocking and berating others:
All this has been said regarding secret sins. But where the sin is quite public so that the judge and everybody know it you can without any sin avoid him and let him go, because he has brought himself into disgrace, and you may also publicly testify concerning him. For when a matter is public in the light of day, there can be no slandering or false judging or testifying; as, when we now reprove the Pope with his doctrine, which is publicly set forth in books and proclaimed in all the world. For where the sin is public, the reproof also must be public, that every one may learn to guard against it.- The Large Catechism of Martin Luther.
But this brings to mind – what is the reason we confront and challenge sin, or in this case – practices or others who are in Christ that we know/feel/believe are not in line with scripture? We may truly believe they are in sin, and we may be right. If so, the reading from 1st Corinthians above tells us actions we can and should take- but it also informs us of the reason – to save their soul. If we understand Luther’s Large Catechism, that is the sense there as well, and warning others of the danger they face in following that direction. But the purpose is never to mock sinners, the purpose is never to taunt or increase the division that may exist. It should never be done with joy, but rather with sorrow and with great pain. Love will never rejoice over sin – either in approving it, or in calling for repentance. Instead it desires to see the damage of sin broken, the bonds that it has shattered. It always looks for ways to embrace the cross – for the joy that is awaited when reconciliation occurs. That has to be our goal. Anything else… well it is our own sin which should drive us to that very same altar of grace.
The reason to confront sin determines how it is to be done, whether in accord for Matthew 18 privately, or in the case of “Public sin” The law must be applied with the intent that when repentance is granted – the love and comfort of grace is poured out without hesitation, without thought. Every sinner, including those who have the task of confronting sin themselves, need to be at the altar, at the foot of the cross. That is where it is supposed to occur. (Paul isn’t kidding about that in First Corinthians, its not just a expression) The same goes when we challenge each others practices, as we discuss. DIvision caused by sin is a grievous thing – not something that should gain us kudos and “likes” as we mock them publicly, as if we were perfect in our thoughts words and practices.
The goal is unity in Christ, unity found in His mercy, in His grace, in His forgiveness and love. It is to call all sinners to receive repentance and faith and to find joy in our relationship with God.
We cry, Lord have mercy… but we
Dr. Martin Luther’s Church Door – Wittenburg, Germany ’93 (Photo credit: Mikey G Ottawa)
need to remember we all need it!
Related articles
- Why I don’t hate “religion”, because it is His One, holy, catholic/christian and apostolic church (justifiedandsinner.com)
