Feast and Follow with Knollwood

Love: The Most Expensive Gift

We say 'I love you,' too much, particularly as English speakers. It's not our fault. English only gives us one word for the most complicated reality in our world. It has become so flat, so overused, that the most common way we see it defined is 'love is love.' What that means, of course, is, 'love is whatever you define it to be.’ For selfish people, that's a great definition. If love is whatever I want it to be, then love revolves around me. But what does God's word say? It says that God is love. That rips the power to define love from us and gives it to Jesus. And, oh, how He has defined it! 

 

We have defined love mostly in terms of what it feels like to us. It’s a very subjective, personal, private, inward thing. It is what happens to me or how I make someone else feel. That way of thinking about love makes it all about ourselves. Everything in love is in reference to me. God defines love in an entirely opposite direction. True, Biblical love is not in reference to your feelings but in sacrificial action towards other people. In order to do this well, at all really, is not to draw from your own well of love. It’s actually quite shallow. You need to draw from love that is coming to you rather than what is inside you, so that is what we are going to be looking at today. 

 

Our main point today is defining love as doing for others what Christ is doing for you. 

Joy, The Art of Self-Forgetfulness

Joy is a serious issue. We give up too quickly on experiencing it, especially if it has been a long time since circumstances have been favorable. I think part of the reason why we give up on it is because we think that joy is optional in the Christian life, when it isn’t. I said at the beginning of this series that the fruit of the Spirit isn’t multiple choice. You can’t decide that you are going to be peaceful without having any self-control. You aren’t going to choose love and leave patience on the table. And you cannot take goodness and leave behind joy. 

 

So is joy just another word for lack of sadness? Well, as I’m sure you’ve heard many times before, joy isn’t just another word for “happiness,” something that changes by circumstances. Jesus wasn’t slap happy all the time, as His weeping before the then-occupied tomb of Lazurus, and the then rebellious house of Jerusalem. Jesus experienced sadness to the point that Isaiah said that He was a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. Yet in all of that, He didn’t fail God’s commands in any way, including this command to rejoice always. 

 

So what is joy? Joy, as we will see in a moment, is happily self-forgetful worship of the transcendent Christ. And this is to be done in all circumstances, even sad ones. How are we to do that? The quick answer is, “Have a good long look at Jesus and what He has done for you.” My old seminary dean once put it this way when defining joy, “Christian joy is marked by celebration and expectation of God's ultimate victory over the powers of sin and darkness, a victory actualized already in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ…" (Timothy George, 401). Christian joy constantly keeps the cross, resurrection, and consummation in mind. 

The Missing Piece of Peace

What is the one thing we are all actually after? Peace. We work hard to earn enough money so we don’t have to worry about life, which is just a negative way of saying that we would like peace. Why do we go to war as nations? Because someone either has upset or threatens to upset peace. Imagine that! War to get peace. Killing each other to get peace. It is the most sought after gift in the world, yet here it is, sitting right in the fruit of the Spirit. It’s not even the first one listed! 

 

Now, what is peace? I imagine that many of you have different answers to what that would mean for you. Some in here, I would imagine, would feel peace if this physical problem would just go away. If only you could hear like you used to, see like you used to, move like you used to, then there would be peace. Peace is found in a return to the past. For others in here, particularly the youth, peace is found in finally reaching the future! If only you could look ahead to see if life is going to be ok for you, you would find peace. For those of us in the middle of those two sections of life, we don’t want the past or the future; we don’t want time to move at all! In fact, if life could just be still for a minute, THEN there would be peace. 

 

All of that is a lie, and it isn’t even the first thing about what real peace is. Those may be pieces of peace, but they are not peace itself or even the things that lead to peace. Peace is a person, the one Who’s arrival caused the angels to sing that verse we’ve just read, “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace among those with whom he is pleased!” What impresses angels so much that they would say that? Well, let’s take a look at what peace means. I’ll give it to you up front, and over the course of the next few minutes together, you’ll see it come from the Scriptures. Peace is the feeling of wholeness solely founded on the fact of Christ's work for you.

Gentleness, the Forgotten Virtue (Updated)

Editor's Note: You may have seen an earlier recording sent out this morning that was the wrong recording! Here is the sermon that you were expecting! 

 

We have a complicated relationship with presents at Christmas time, don’t we? We wrestle with the idea that Christmas has become too commercialized and hate that stores have taken the meaning of Christmas from good tidings of great joy to great spending on good toys. That is true as far as it goes, but who can deny how good it feels to give a child a great present that they are so thankful for? It’s a great feeling to do that for adults as well, especially if it is a practical gift that they will use everyday. One of the most useful gifts I got from Abby was an electric kettle. You fill the thing up with water, set it on the little base, turn it on, and in a couple of minutes, you have water heated perfectly for tea or coffee! It is a perfect gift for me that has been going strong for a couple years now. The thing is though, it is so much a part of my everyday life, that I often forget that it was a gift. It just blends into the kitchen. 

I think that is often what happens with the gifts that God gives to us. They are so freely given to us, and often so perfectly suited to our needs, that they just become part of the background of our lives. And I’m not even talking about the physical gifts like the car you got here in today, or the house you came from, I’m am talking about the gifts that are given to you in your life that you don’t notice are there. I’m talking about the fruit of the Spirit. There is no gift more practical, more satisfying to oneself and others than the fruit of the Spirit. You’ll notice that I say “fruit” not “fruits,” and that comes from something that Pastor Reader would always point out. This list of virtues in its entirety is present in the life of a true Christian; they are not multiple choice. We are expected to have all of them, even if we have more of one virtue than another. 

There isn’t a way to cover all of these virtues comprehensively in just a few weeks, so I have selected a few that correspond more or less with the theme of the advent candle for that week. Unfortunately, for this sermon, hope is not on the this list in Galatians, but I think that the one I’ve picked out today is often not talked about, hence the title of sermon, the forgotten virtue of gentleness. 

Faithfulness Himself

You know what made the holidays so special as a kid? The fact that everything was taken care of by someone else! You could sit back and enjoy watching dad cut down the tree (or struggle to figure out which branches went in which order on the artificial tree), you could smell the food your mother was cooking, and best of all looking under the tree on Christmas morning to see the presents that were bought for you! Those memories are wonderful, but some can look at those days as joys long gone by. Oh, those were the days when someone else took care of you, but now that responsibility is all on you and with it the nagging fear that perhaps you won’t be able to pull it off, that disaster is just around the corner. Now the eggnog makes sense. But perhaps that wasn’t your experience of the holidays. Perhaps what makes them painful to remember was the fact that there weren’t people caring for you when there should have been. The responsibilities of life were thrust on you very early, and now life is viewed through the lens of “I got myself this far, so I think I’ll make it the rest of the way.” This sense of self-sufficiency if it isn’t bravado, is simply the lack of realizing how delicate life can be. 
This Psalm has something to say to the both of us. Quite simply the Psalmist is telling us not to trust in people but to trust in God. What made the holidays so carefree when we were children is that we trusted the powerful people in our lives, and when those people were no longer in power, that simple trust has vanished. And in my short time in ministry, I’ve met a few self-sufficient people who suddenly were reminded how delicate they really are and thus lost that confidence. 
This Psalm, I trust, will help you regain that sense of childlike joy of this season, not because you are trusting in a new person (even if that person is yourself) but because you’ve got your eyes on Jesus.

Picture of a Promise, Part 2

Have you ever kept a letter from someone that you love, even if that person is still with you? Or maybe you’ve saved voicemails or text message threads of the same. It is an strange thing that we would keep these messages when we still have a relationship with the real person, but then it isn’t. These messages that we have are moments where the other person has revealed something about themselves, and that act is what is special. I still have the first messages that Abby and I exchanged when we were dating because those messages revealed that budding love between the two of us. It was a witness to the relationship we already had that gave the place for those messages to be exchanged. 

Keeping that in mind will help you understand why Presbyterians get so excited about covenants in the Bible. We’re big on this! We name our churches, colleges, even children after this concept because a covenant is like a letter from God. A covenant reveals Who God is, what He is like, and most critically, how He works. Covenants are the first messages that God sends to His people, and in fact, covenants are how God gathers His people (Myers, 2).

Picture of a Promise, Part 1

When I was growing up, I remember seeing a brand that was outdoors related that had little stickers that said, “Life is good.” It depicted little stick figures relaxing in hammocks or driving little Jeeps. We’ve often used the phrase ourselves after a great meal, or sitting on the back porch watching our kids play in the yard. There’s nothing wrong with that at all; life is good. But when the hammock isn’t out, or when life is hard, another common phrase in our fallen world, the statement “Life is good” can feel glib or in really dark places, can feel like a lie. That’s where this passage comes in to help us. This passage tells us that not only is life good and worthy of preservation, life is precious because it is made in the image of God. Life is good, and because it is, it has real demands, actual, personal responsibilities on how we treat it. Questions 135-136 of the Larger Catechism go into great detail that the command “you shall not murder” goes way beyond just not killing people, but goes into preserving life as well. In fact, in 136, it sees that the sins this commandment forbids goes all the way down to “desire of revenge; all excessive passions, distracting cares; immoderate use of meat, drink, labor, and recreations; provoking words, oppression, quarreling, striking, wounding, and whatsoever else tends to the destruction of the life of any.” This passage has a lot to say to us today!  

And Like A Flood

Our world is under the judgment of God today. It is not just that the world is doing things that will bring judgment, the things that they are doing ARE the judgment. I don’t have to describe to you what you see on the nightly news about the sexual revolution and transgenderism. I don’t have to rehearse the images that you’ve seen coming out of the various wars around the world. You all see these things plainly every day. And while there will come a day when there will be a great judgment over the whole planet, as we will see in a minute, we already have the seeds of that right in front of us. In Romans 1, we see God hand over people to their sin as part of their judgment. Essentially, God would be saying, “Do you want to bend nature and rebel against God’s rule for marriage and intimacy? Ok, let’s see you do that. Let’s see how far that can take you.” We are seeing this play out in hatred leading to war. We are seeing this play out in apathy to the Bible and faithful living. We are seeing the consequences of God handing our world over to what it wants. 

 

Now admittedly, that seems a little scary, doesn’t it? I mean, we have to go along for the ride! Yes, we will be spared ultimate judgment, but boy, it doesn’t look like things are going to be all that smooth leading up to that either. What do we do? How do we react to seeing the world handed over to the sin that it wants and us having to suffer the consequences of that? Well, this passage is going to tell us how to do that. Noah had to literally go along for the ride of judgment on the Earth. Noah didn’t like anything that was going on in the world, yet a planetary flood was coming to the planet Noah lived on. This was going to make an impact on his life. How did Noah react to being in the midst of God’s judgment? Well, he hoped only in God and responded in worship. Coincidentally, those are the main points for today: God is your only hope in the midst of judgment and The proper response to judgment is worship. 

You Will Pass Through the Waters

The story of Noah’s ark is one of the most misrepresented stories in the Bible. We see this story depicted in children’s bibles and nursery room walls in cute, colorful illustrations of animals floating in a boat, with a long giraffe neck sticking outside the boat because it is too long as they float peacefully on the waters. You would never see a children’s book drawn that way about hurricane Katrina. There would be no happy looking people floating in boats in New Orleans. Why? Because people would rightly complain that we wouldn’t be capturing the devastation that the hurricane brought. What we are looking at here makes Katrina look like a sunshower. This story is of the judgment of God against sinners who finally exhaust His patience. But those children’s bibles and nursery walls captured something right about this story. Because it is also the story of surprising grace given to Noah and the future humanity that will come from him. God is going to do something amazing through Noah, and the amount of work that Noah is going to do to make that happen is going to provide a great encouragement for us. Our two points today are God really did flood the whole earth for human sin, and God really did save His people from it.

The End is Nearer

Doesn’t it seem like the world is falling apart? There are many times in history in which one could say this. Just in the last century we have seen two world wars, the development of the atom bomb, worldwide terrorism, and most subtly, the terrifying falling population rates that will cause some countries to disappear nearly entirely in the next century (China is looking like its population will be halved in the next thirty years). If you are watching the news nightly, or heaven help you if you are getting your news constantly on your phone, you will find many reasons to think that this is a hopeless situation. 

 

If you were alive at the time of Genesis 6, though, these days would seem tame! In Genesis 6 we are seeing the beginning of the first end. We are going to find out why a world-wide flood was the proper response to this world. 

 

But there are a number of confusing things in this text! Is this text talking about fallen angels having super-babies with humanity? Is God giving the world 120 years to repent, or is he setting the new human age limit? What is this saying that God regrets making humanity? Did God not see this coming and thus doesn’t hold our future? AHHHH! Indeed, these are important questions, and it is right here, in some of the scariest parts of Scripture and our lives where God’s promises shine the brightest. Some of the above questions are matters of debate and mystery, and some are going to be left unsolved, but what we are going to walk away from our time together with is a new confidence in God’s ability to both know and control the future. Our two points today are Evil has dominated in the world before yet God knows how to save His people