He Shall Be Called.....Dayspring
January 4, 2008 Text: John 1:78 (and related texts)
Full-page headline in The New York Post, dated January 1st:
2008: Thank God It’s Over!
The three anchor people on the news network where I saw that headline New Year’s morning said: “Oh, it wasn’t that bad a year . . .” and they said things like some of you in this congregation are so good at saying, things Christians are expected to say: “We should count our blessings. If we have jobs, we should be thankful.” The news people named several positive things, and I agreed with them all, and I still couldn’t get that New York Post New Year’s Day headline out of my mind:
2008: Thank God It’s Over!
Most people – if not all – obviously don’t believe that a calendar year called 2008 is to blame for:
- Historic numbers of people in mortgage foreclosure (or in danger of it);
- A $700 billion congressional bailout (your money, and mine) of the banking industry, and the banking industry said last week that it doesn’t know exactly where that money is, or how it’s being used;
And . . . well, any of us can provide evidence of how 2008 was a dark year! But why blame the year, even if we do it tongue-in-cheek? Because ever since the Garden of Eden – when Adam pointed the finger at his wife, Eve and said She made me eat it – we’ve needed someone to blame for the darkness of this world. Even a calendar year.
Even God.
A week earlier – Christmas morning – on that same news network I mentioned before, the anchorwoman was interviewing a young Roman Catholic priest (a frequent guest on the show). And they were talking about how rotten 2008 was . . . and then the anchorwoman said:
“Don’t you think it’s fair that God should accept some of the responsibility for this? After all, He put us all here, started all this in motion.”
And the priest very patiently explained: “Most – maybe not all – but most of what we’re bemoaning in the world today is the result of bad decision-making. It’s the result of human behavior. In other words it’s the result of sin.”
And at that point, the interview was over. Instantly. The anchorwoman said to the priest: Well, thanks for stopping by with your nice little sermon.
We don’t want to hear it! We don’t want to hear that the darkness of this world is caused by us . . . any more than we want to hear that the solution to the darkness doesn’t belong to us. David knew that 3,000 years ago when he wrote Psalm 14:
The Lord looks down from heaven to see if there are any who understand, any who seek God . . . (but) all have turned aside (and) there is no one who does good. – Psalm 14:2-3
I can trace back to one night when my marriage to the mother of my children was finally broken. I had been offered a certain opportunity in ministry and the response, immediately, was: “If you accept it, I will leave you”.
There was no discussion. We were awake all that Sunday night, with Monday a work day for us both. But we never slept. We took turns pacing. We took turns raising our voices. We even lay down and tried to hold each other, but for both of us, it was like holding stone. We held hands sometimes, but with a lot of bed between us, that might as well have been a continent. No one wanted to give an inch. We cried, we were silent, it all came out, we blamed each other for the darkness we were in . . . we (several times!) tried to pray, but we even took issue with each other’s prayers and couldn’t finish. As David said, since we were seeking our own separate ways and not God’s, we accomplished no good. That was one of the darkest nights of my life. This went on until 5 a.m., and I remember my then-wife standing at the window and saying: “Andrew, won’t the sun ever come up?”
It makes all the difference, doesn’t it? It will all look better, my Grandmother used to say, once it’s light. And she knew darkness, living down in a West Virginia valley where it starts getting dark about 3:30 in the afternoon during the winter. That’s why she’d sit down at her piano and play hymns and sing, to bring some light into that Appalachian darkness and into the seasonal affective disorder she suffered. She knew no human light, no solution we manufacture, can pierce the darkness we find ourselves in. Not just any sunrise will bring the light we need.
We have a worship service starting today, called All Things New, but sometimes new means new discoveries of old things. That’s what happens – hopefully – every time we pick up the Bible. A new discovery just for us in all these ancient words. And when we look at what Luke wrote about the coming of the true light into this world, his words are translated in various modern ways:
He will cause the bright dawn of salvation to rise upon us. – Luke 1:78 (TEV)
Heaven’s dawn is about to break upon us. (LB)
. . . the rising sun will come to us from heaven. (NIV)
All beautiful, but sometimes you can’t beat the classics. The King James Version (that Anne led us in this morning) uses an unforgettable word for the coming of the light that is not just any light:
. . . through the tender mercy of our God; whereby, the Dayspring from on high hath visited us. – Luke 1:78 (KJV)
The Dayspring. It’s an old English word that means the precise moment dawn breaks upon the darkness. If you are standing at the window of a transition in your life, wondering whether the light will ever come, it will. If you watch for Him and if you want Him and realize we can’t solve this world and you ask Him. And at your darkest moment, the moment of your greatest need, the moment God chooses, the precise moment, the right moment, the Dayspring – Jesus Christ – will break upon your darkness.
And the day will come.
Why does the Dayspring come? Tender mercy the Bible says. It is not God’s desire for any of us to struggle in the dark of our sin. Because God is so tender toward us, He has given us not just a way, but the only way to light the darkness.
Remember the line we sing nearly every December in our Classic Worship service?
O Come, thou Dayspring, come and cheer our spirits by Thine Advent here.
Two days from now is a day called Epiphany, which means to reveal; it’s the conclusion of the 12 Days of Christmas when the wise men (led by the light of a star) have Jesus revealed to them). But one author tells a story (and scripture would allow room for this) that the wise men started out looking for the King of the Jews, but got discouraged partway through the journey. And with all their caravans, they sat down in the desert, dejected, stalled out, without direction, in the dark.
And that’s when the light broke in, and the star guided them all the way to Jesus and a whole new meaning of life.
The Dayspring, Jesus Christ, has broken upon the darkness of this world, but we have to be willing to see it and follow it. As I grew up, I used to sit in the living room and read. right next to a light, but I never turned the light on. My dad inevitably said: “Andrew, turn on the light, buddy, you can’t see there.”
Stubbornly, I would say, “Yes, I can”. And I would continue to read in the dark. This dialogue went on for years. You’ll ruin your eyes…..No, I won’t. We even had that conversation in our last year together! There comes a point where can’t see becomes won’t see. And that takes us back to 2008: Thank God It’s Over maybe should read 2008: Did we look for God this year?
But Jesus Christ, the Dayspring, is still breaking upon the darkness of this world whether we choose to see Him or not.
America is getting ready to inaugurate a president in a couple of weeks, and if you’ve been following the news, there’s a contingent of people who have petitioned the court system to remove the words so help me God from the presidential oath of office. And Rick Warren – the pastor of Saddleback Church in California – has been asked to administer the oath of office. There are those who have complained, and criticized, and tried to get Mr. Obama to change his mind, and tried to stop it from happening, because people are afraid of one word that Rick Warren might say in his prayer. What is that word?
Jesus.
Pastor Warren has even been directly asked about what he will say, and his answer has been: “I’m a Christian pastor. I’m going to pray the only way I know how”. So if Warren uses the phrase In Jesus’s name, how should we see that? Is it a victory for conservative politics? Is it a victory for evangelical Christianity? Is it a victory if Rick Warren says the word Jesus?
If he doesn’t, I won’t be all mad at Rick Warren. If he does, I won’t jump up and down as if it’s some big triumph. If Warren says Jesus, I will pray – and I will hope – that someone, somewhere will hear that name and choose to see and allow the light of the Dayspring to pierce their darkness. Won’t you? Despite the forces arrayed to censor Rick Warren’s remarks, the Dayspring is the only hope of this world. The only hope to light the dark. To forgive the things we do that make it dark. To change individual lives and guide individual souls like ours to heaven. Peter said it this way in his second letter (again, the King James Version):
. . . ye do well that ye take heed (in other words, pay attention), as unto a light that shineth in a dark place, until the day dawn, and the dayspring arise in your hearts.
That’s where the Dayspring makes His difference.
A Christian man named John in Washington state tells the story of how he was heading into a grocery store to buy something, and a man outside asked him for a dollar. “Why do you want it?” John asked the man.
The man said: “To buy some wine”.
John writes, “Normally, I’d give him a quarter or something to get rid of him. But I said ‘If you’re still here in 5 minutes when I come out, I know a 24-hour house, and I’ll take you there, and you can begin to dry out and start a new life.’”
John went into the store, came out 5 minutes later, and the man was still there. He was waiting for John. Do you know why? Because he saw something in John, something of the Dayspring, that even in his alcoholism he wanted. He chose to see!
Is the Dayspring shining out enough in you and me that someone living in the dark might choose it for himself?
Andrew Hoover, Pastor, East Columbus Christian Church
Making the Most of Time
December 28, 2008 – New Year’s Sermon Text: Psalm 90:12
You’ll have to rely on your knowledge of our spiritual history – and on your imagination – but picture with me a man in charge of a whole lot of people. Stubborn people. God’s people, but stubborn, sinful people. They’re wandering in the wilderness (we should all be able to picture that, and put ourselves there) and their leader, whose name is Moses, goes a little apart from them to pray. That’s what Psalm 90 – which we read together – is. A prayer of Moses, the man of God it says.
And what Moses is praying is: God, You are eternal. We are momentary. Because of our sin, life is not what it should be.
At the dawn of another New Year, perhaps we should ask with Moses: Do we have a purpose? What should we do with what little time You’ve given us? Teach us to number our days (the NIV Bible has him saying). Teach us to make the most of our time (the Living Bible says) so that we may grow in wisdom.
Time sometimes seems an insurmountable challenge for Americans, doesn’t it? Even American Christians. It really is for me. Manage your time or your time will manage you someone said. Even retired people have often said to me: "I’m busier now than when I was working." And it really seems to speed up, doesn’t it? The less of it we have, the more valuable time becomes. No wonder Moses prayed: Teach us to make the most of our time.
- - If ever you say it’s only a year, think what a year means to a child held back in school.
- - If ever you say it’s only a month, think what a month means to a family whose loved one is terminally ill.
- - If ever you say it’s only a week, think of what a week means to someone whose paycheck only stretches from Friday to Friday.
- - If ever you say it’s only a day, you might want to consider the wonderful old musical Brigadoon. Do you remember? Because of their pastor’s prayer to protect the people from wickedness, the town of Brigadoon appeared out of the mist only one day out of every hundred years. How they cherished that one day!
- - If ever you say oh, well, it’s only an hour, consider how Jesus in Gethsemane asked Peter, James and John to watch with him and pray against temptation. And then He found them sleeping. Can’t you feel His feelings when He asked them: "Couldst thou not watch with Me one brief hour?" The importance of only an hour, or even a few minutes, to someone who really needs us.
Time is precious. Moses knew it. On his knees, he knew we only have a little and he’s clearly troubled about it. Jesus wasn’t, though. I think maybe Jesus had the right idea about time. Someone has pointed out that He made friends with time, even though Jesus had the most important job anyone has ever had, redeeming the world. But He still had time to consider the lilies of the field, remember? He had time to take a bunch of little kids on His lap and talk to them.
Time is precious, and yet Jesus seems to teach us not to stress about it. "Be not anxious about tomorrow ", he said.
Time is a gift of God. It’s not for wasting – Henry David Thoreau once said as if anyone could kill time without injuring eternity – it’s for befriending like Jesus did.
If time is a gift of God, then what a valuable gift for us to give to someone else! Unlike me, and maybe you, Jesus never put a blind beggar, or a bleeding woman, or a short little tax collector who climbed a tree to see Him, on His appointment calendar. He gave them all the gift of His time to meet their needs. I am 50 years old. That’s 18,250 days. If I live to be 75 – my dad’s age at the time of his death – that will be 27,375 days. That may mean I only have a little over 9,000 days left. That’s not much. Moses was right. None of us has much. Is there someone in your life who might be truly blessed by more of yours?
Elizabeth - who’s working at the funeral home this morning – and I had a funeral years ago for a 21-year-old boy who committed suicide. His girlfriend had broken up with him, and he couldn’t find any reason to go on. His decision, I know, but I wonder – as his mother did – if someone had given him more time . . . At the grave, I asked people to seek each other out, right then, tell their feelings, invest their love, say I love you, don’t delay . . . Moses was right. We spring up new in the morning, we’re dry and withered by evening, but in between, isn’t one of our purposes to love each other, refresh each other, by spending our time with each other?
Paul wrote to the Ephesians: Be very careful, then, how you live – not as unwise, but as wise, making the most of every opportunity, because the days are evil (Ephesians 2:15-16). That phrase in Greek really means looking around for opportunities to redeem the time. You might have a time deficit, a shortfall, with someone in your life who really needs more from you. Do you remember the famous song by Harry Chapin called "Cat’s in the Cradle"? I want to play a little of it to refresh your memory.
---- Play excerpt from Cat’s in the Cradle ---
The ironic thing is that Harry Chapin was becoming exactly that kind of father to his own son, Josh. When Josh was 7, Harry was doing 200 concerts a year. Never home. Harry’s wife, Sandy, who wrote the words to Cat’s in the Cradle, asked: "When are you ever going to spend any time with our son?"
Harry promised he would by the end of the summer. But near the end of the summer, Harry Chapin died when a truck crashed into his little Volkswagen on a New Jersey freeway. He never gave the gift of time he said was so important.
Dear friends, let us look around for opportunities to redeem the time as Paul says. Through stories like Harry Chapin’s, God is teaching us to make the most of our time as Moses prayed.
A new year begins Thursday at midnight, and I wonder – if you have a regret about 2008 – what is it? If you are a Christian, I wonder if it might have to do with spending time with the Lord. You might have a time each day during which you pray and read your Bible. If you don’t, I hope you’ll create one. What about all the cracks and crevices in your day? Like a mason fills the cracks with mortar, why not fill the spare moments with time for God? I’m still learning that, but I’m learning.
James writes in chapter 4 of his letter: You do not even know what will happen tomorrow. What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes. Instead, you ought to say: If it is the Lord’s will, we will live and do this or that (James 4:14-15). The way we plan and use time is so much different – so much better – when we choose to include the One who made time in the first place!
When I was growing up, Sunday mornings at our home were a little challenging. The church day started at 9:30, and my mother’s goal was to get there a good 10-15 minutes early. Nothing wrong with that, except that my sister was not the quickest at getting ready, and my father was just about the same. Mother would do some pacing, do some heavy sighing – you know the kind – clear her throat (ahem) – and generally make herself anxious. Her punctuality was admirable, but I look back on that and think: Why didn’t she and I quietly sit and talk about the Lord? Maybe pray? Or go in to the piano and sing a hymn or two?
How much less anxious, and more fun, Sunday morning would have been, and how much better prepared we would have been to go!
I am only taking my mother to task because I am much the same. I need to be much more like Martin Luther, who once said: "I have so much to do today that I shall spend the first three hours of the day in prayer."
Would Jesus have been ready to go to the cross if He had not spent that time in Gethsemane, alone with His Father? I’ve sometimes wondered, when time – when time – with God is so obviously lacking in us – don’t we like Him? We tend to spend our time on those we like. Don’t we like God? Elizabeth urged regular prayer upon us a few weeks ago, as a church, but if we see it as a chore, we won’t spend much – if any – time on it. On prayer. On Him.
And He knows that. Carlo Carretto, great Christian leader in Europe in the mid-20th Century, once wrote: Prayer is the sum of our relationship with God. We are what we pray. The degree of our faith is the degree of our prayer. The strength of our hope is the strength of our prayer. The warmth of our charity is the warmth of our prayer. And our prayer will accompany us into eternity.
And if Carretto is right – which he is – and we have not spent time with the Lord in prayer – how can we expect Him even to know us? Or have Him not wonder: How much greater things could you have accomplished for Me if you had just taken time with Me?
I shouldn’t illustrate this way, but I will: For 2 years I have been involved with our November prayer retreats. Not nearly enough people come, but I’m glad I have. Because I love to steal sidelong glances at Harry and Sandy praying together. When I watch them – their closeness – the look of striving with and adoring God on their faces – it makes me remember that when I really have something serious with which to approach the Eternal One, I go to one of them. Because they know Him. They know Him because they spend time with Him.
Teach us to make the most of our time Moses prayed. To value time as a precious gift from God. To give time as a gift, an investment in someone who needs us. To spend time with God Himself, constantly, as though He is someone we truly care about. And, finally, this:
To everything there is a season (the Book of Ecclesiastes says) and a time for every purpose under heaven (Ecclesiastes 3:1). Although I have clearly said not to be anxious about time, not to stress about it, there is still an urgency about time for the Christian believer. It is always time to share our faith. Winning people to salvation in Jesus Christ is always in season.
Pastor John Harper was in a bittersweet situation. His wife had died and left him with their six-year-old daughter to raise. But God had called him to a dream assignment: A new church in Chicago, Illinois. A new start, a new way to serve God, better opportunities for his child.
The two of them boarded a ship in Southampton, England on April 12, 1912. It was a ship – kind of like John himself – making its maiden voyage to America. It was called Her Majesty’s Ship The Titanic.
Titanic survivors remember how John Harper organized Bible studies immediately, leading people he’d never met in study and prayer. He witnessed constantly, not knowing that just before midnight, on the 4th day of the voyage, the Titanic would meet its doom.
John ran to his stateroom and told the woman who was watching his daughter that the ship was in danger of sinking. He grabbed his little one, ran to the deck, and put her in a lifeboat. He then began helping all the other passengers, calling out: “Women, children and the unsaved to the lifeboats!”
When he felt he had done all he could, he gave someone else his life jacket and slipped into the icy water.
One man wrote the following story:
“I am a survivor of the Titanic. As we struggled to stay alive in the water, the tide brought Mr. Harper near me, floating on a bit of debris. He called out to me: “Man, are you saved?” No, I am not, I told him. “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and you will be!” Mr. Harper said, and he floated away. A second time, Mr. Harper floated back. “Man, are you saved yet?” Not yet, I admitted. “You must believe in Jesus, man. Be saved!” And slowly, Mr. Harper stopped talking and sank into the water.”
The man finishes by saying: “I am the last convert of John Harper.”
Moses wasn’t wrong about his prayer. Our years quickly pass he said and they are trouble and sorrow. It is a Titanic of a world, icebergs are plentiful, time is urgent, and it is never not time to throw a life preserver to an unsaved person. If they don’t hear the first time, float back to them. But until we run out of breath, God needs a church full of John Harpers who find the salvation of other people so valuable that we spend our time on them . . . to the last second we have.
If I may, I’ll close with words once spoken by Billy Graham: Our days are numbered. One of the primary goals in our lives should be to prepare for our last day. The legacy we leave is not our possessions, but the quality of our lives. What preparations should we be making now?
Andrew Hoover, Pastor, East Columbus Christian Church
