6.00pm
Lamentations
3:19-23
As we come
this evening to conclude out Lent evening series on
‘Following Christ’, we
direct our thoughts to ‘
Perhaps the
most important thing is how we react when we fail, when we sin. Well
are we
advised to ‘keep short accounts’ with God; well do
we confess any sin so soon
as we are aware of it, and seek and know that we have received
God’s
forgiveness. All that I have said so fare is summed up in that verse
from
John’s first epistle, which is the Christians life-line:
If
we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves,
and the truth is not in us, but if we confess our sin, God is faithful
and just
to forgive our sin and cleanse us from all unrighteousness. (1:9)
The danger
is if and when we grow slack in this, and when we fail to confess and
receive
forgiveness. For then we become separated from our Lord, and our
spiritual
life-blood is cut off. A spiritual torpor and apathy set in, and slowly
and
bit-by-bit we lose our interest in Christian things, in the life of the
Spirit.
We may remain very ‘spiritual’ on the outside for
quite some time, but inwardly
we know that we are living a lie, acting out a charade. We may fool
others; God
we will not fool, for God is never fooled. He knows us and knows our
inner
hearts better than we know them ourselves. But, a true Christian can
never live
a life of sin, a life separated from his Lord and be happy about it.
Joy goes.
Hope goes. Love grows cold. As the hymn-writer puts it, “by
many deeds of
shame, we learn that love grows cold”. But, you know, we may
give up on God,
but He never gives up on us. He may send us into a spiritual desert. We
are, as
it were, like his Old Testament people, ‘sent into
exile’. God’s people’s
experience is very instructive. Time and again God warns his people
that if
they turn from Him, then they will experience increasing difficulties,
and
hardship, they will be warned by the prophets, but eventually, if they
persist
in rebellion, then they we be driven from their Promised Land.
Eventually,
of course, God’s people- first the Northern Kingdoms, then
the Southern were
taken captive, respectively by Assyria and
By
the waters of
But the
message of the prophets is also, even in this situation, a message of
hope; a
message that even when all seems lost, there can we new hope. That is
the
message of that passage from Lamentations we heard a little earlier.
It’s worth
just getting this passage in its context. The Jews of the Southern
Kingdom had
wandered from God and had ignored the message of prophets like Jeremiah
who
warned them that their eventual fate would be exile. They wanted
prophets who
told them what they wanted to hear, but that wasn’t
God’s message. So, they
were taken into captivity. The book of Lamentations was written in that
situation. The writer is commonly assumed to be Jeremiah, though we
don’t know
for sure- but whoever wrote it wrote with an overwhelming sense of
despair. The
people had craved after sin: now they were reaping the consequences of
their
folly. And Laurence Richards, writing about Lamentations, does have a
word of
warning for us, for he writes this:
The
day
must come when we look back on our lost opportunities and
realise the misery we endure is a consequence of our own chronic
craving for
sin.
But in the
midst of the gloom, there shines in a shaft of light; a light which
shows that
even in such situations of loss, there is always a new hope.
In verses
19 and 20 the writer says that, yes, he remembers the affliction, the
wandering
and the gall; he remembers the bitterness of his situation, and the
writer
doesn’t divorce himself from an apostate nation. But then he
says this: this I call to mind,
and therefore I have
hope.
So- what
brings him hope; what can bring hope- in terms of discipleship, to the
‘backslidden’ Christian. We don’t hear
much nowadays about the ‘backslidden
Christian’; yet it can, and sadly all too often does.
He begins
by saying that we are never ‘consumed’- our
situation can never totally
overwhelm and destroy us, and why? Because
of the Lord’s great love. The
Old Testament word for God’s love is a word
for ‘covenant love’. It is because of
God’s covenant with us, a covenant
underpinned and under-girded by God’s love. God’s
covenant love and grace is
something we often don’t appreciate. I wish I had time to go
into it fully.
When we celebrate the Holy Communion, we hear in the consecration
prayer these
words:
This
is my blood of the new covenant shed for
you. Jesus in the
Upper Room echoed the words of the Old Covenant made at Sinai, when
Moses
sprinkled first the later then the people with the sacrificial blood,
saying This
is the blood of the covenant which the
Lord has made with you. Blood
was a symbol of a covenant, which was a
legally binding deal between two parties. At Sinai, the terms of the
Covenant
were the Commandment; the terms between God and
Verses 22
and 23 of Lamentations 3 go on to speak of God’s compassion
and faithfulness.
The prophet Hosea speaks of a God who sends his people into exile only
so that
he can woo them back to himself. Truly his compassion never fails.
Every day
God longs to show us his compassion, his mercy.
The Christian Gospel contains, in one sense, a shocking license to sin! However much we may have sinned, however far we have wandered, God is seeking to find us and restore us.
*Read
more about the
Covenants
Can I just
be personal for a moment. I hesitate to bare my soul, yet I feel the
subject
demands it. About three or four months ago, I felt I had grown so lax
as a
Christian that I had well and truly ‘blown it’.
Then I heard a talk, and these
words penetrated my darkness. “God longs to accept us just as
we are”. Suddenly
I had new hope when all seemed lost!
I want to
end with three verses from Hosea, from chapter 6:
Come, let
us return to the Lord. He has
torn us
to pieces, but he will heal us; he has injured us, but he will bind up
our
wounds. After two days he will revive us; on the third day he will
restore us,
that we may live in his presence. Let us acknowledge the Lord, let us
press on
to acknowledge him. As sure as the sun rises, he will appear.
As
followers of Christ, we may forsake him; all may seem lost, but there
is always
new hope.