Sermons

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Soak It In
June 18, 2000
Pastor Dan Baumgartner

When I titled my sermon today, “Soak It In,” I had no idea it would be raining this morning!

This morning, we have the pleasure of reading from the Old Testament prophet, Zephaniah. Zephaniah.  Sounds a little bit like a Bible trivia question, doesn’t it?  Is there actually a book called Zephaniah?  Is this one of those pastor’s jokes where I look all over the Bible for something that’s not there?  No, it’s real.  A small book, just three chapters, buried near the end of the Old Testament.

Zephaniah 3:14-20

[Pull out canoe paddle]
Some of you have seen this hanging in my office.  It’s a canoe paddle that was presented to me by a group of men, when I left Minnesota, to commemorate two canoe trips we took.  The whole northern part of the state is a beautiful, very untouched area called the Boundary Waters Canoe Area.   It is a vast series of lakes which are almost connected with each other.   Now, I say “almost” connected because there’s about 1/8  to ¼ mile between them.  So, the drill is that you canoe for a while, then go ashore, pick up your 60 pound backpack, pick up the canoe and carry it on your head, walk a ways, put in at a different lake, paddle a while, etc.  They call it portaging, and they think it is really, really fun!  But the wilderness is breathtaking, and it gets prettier the further you go. 

On one of my trips, to get home we had to paddle across Seagull Lake.  It’s a very long lake, and we had our eye at a campsite on an island at the far end of it.  We’d already been paddling for most of a day, and as we started down this last long stretch, the wind came whipping up against us.  That of course made the water quite choppy, and if you didn’t keep paddling firmly, the canoe would blow off to the side and you’d make no progress. It was getting windier and windier, so we paddled with increasing urgency.  The last stretch was across a large piece of open water, and we gave it everything we had to get across to the island.   We finally made it, and we were exhausted.  We dragged the canoes up, broke out the food and ate some lunch.  We were so tired that, without a word, we all grabbed sleeping bags or pads, and took them to some large rocks there by the lake.  And just then the wind died down, and the sun came out, and we all closed our eyes and lay there like a bunch of walruses.  It felt so good, we all fell asleep with little smiles on our faces, just soaking it up like a sponge. 

The prophet Zephaniah spends the first two chapters of his book chewing out people.  First the country of Judah, then the countries all around, then the city of Jerusalem…like somebody getting in the face of Oregon, Idaho, Montana, British Columbia and then Seattle.  In no uncertain terms, Zephaniah chews the people out for being immoral, idolatrous, for being complacent, for disobeying God, for being hard-hearted towards God.  It’s almost hard to read those two chapters. 

And then suddenly, in chapter 3 it all shifts, and we read words of comfort and protection.  Perhaps Zephaniah is just in keeping with the middle of his name, which is “YHWH hides.”  As in God-hides, as in “God-hides-his-people-from-trouble.”  Out of nowhere, he tells people to sing and shout and be glad and rejoice.  Now, after reading the first two chapters, we have to ask…over what?  Rejoice over calamity, threats, warning, punishment?  No.  Rejoice over what comes in verse 17.  It’s one of my very favorite.  It is how God feels about His people:

The Lord your God is with you.   He is mighty to save.   He will take great delight in you.   He will quiet you with His love.    He will rejoice over you with singing. 

Do you hear that message?  CAN you hear it?  It is a love song.  From God to you.  It’s a promise, it’s a statement of how God feels about YOU.  And so this morning I want to encourage you to just try and soak it up.  Like a sponge.

It’s the toughest thing about the faith, I think…at least for me.  To really believe this most basic thing:  The Lord loves you.  Now.  As you sit, as you are there in that pew, fully aware of your sins/faults/ shortcomings and baggage…the Lord loves you.

Most of us, most of the time, find this incredibly difficult to believe.  Oh, we are perfectly willing to NOT believe in God.  Or to believe that God is mad at me.  Just don’t ask me to believe that God loves me, not when I perform or am good or pray or am all studied up on my Bible or when I do volunteer work.  No, we’ve missed it.  It’s so hard to believe that God loves you just where you came in the door this morning.   Love comes from grace, it comes from God’s end.  Philip Yancey once wrote: “Grace means that there’s nothing I can do that will make God love me more…AND there’s nothing I can do that will make the Lord love me less.”  It’s grace.  And this morning I invite you to just soak in these verses.

The Lord your God is with you.  Literally “in the midst of you.”  The Lord your God is with you, wherever you come from this morning.  If you are ashamed of something, if you are in tough relationship problems somewhere, out of a job, in a job…the Lord is still with you.  Not in a condemning way, but with you in ALL ways.  In Isaiah 43 God says,

“I have summoned you by name and you are mine, when you pass through the waters I will be with you, the rivers will not sweep over you, when you pass through the fire you will not be burned.  Why?  Because I will be with you.” 

The whole Old Testament in particular is filled with people being fearful.  And in almost every case, do you know what God’s answer is?  “I will be with you, I love you, I will not leave you.”  We see it all over the New Testament as well.  We saw it when Peter wanted to step out of the boat and go to Jesus, and Jesus said “C’mon.  Come to me.  Keep your eyes focused on me.  I won’t leave you.”  And he didn’t.  The Lord your God is with you.

He is mighty to save.   Someone once said that the Christian religion is a “rescue” religion, that God is a “rescuing” God.  So many times we say, “Well, I don’t really need to be rescued, don’t need to be saved.”  But rescue has two sides to it: One is to be saved FROM something.  Perhaps some of us need to be saved from living shallow lives, from having such a self-focus, or in a bigger sense from spending an eternity apart from God.  We all need that.  But there’s also a saving TO something, to a life that matters and counts.  God is in that business as well. 

I don’t know how many of you saw on Easter afternoon a new TV movie.  I think it replaced one of those Easter classics like “Ben-Hur” or “The Robe.”  It was a life of Jesus, and it was done partly in animation and partly in claymation.  It was an okay show, but there was one part in particular that was really beautiful.  It was where Jesus was going to call the disciples. 

Jesus was in the midst of a big crowd, and he began to look around the crowd, wondering who it was that ought to come and follow him.  And he began to pick people out of the crowd.  And it went like this:  “Well, c’mon Peter, you need to come with me.  And Andrew, yes.  James, follow me!  And John, c’mon.”  And he picked eleven people…just one more to go.  And Jesus kept looking around.  Now in the background behind Jesus sat a tax collector’s booth, and in that booth of course sat Matthew.  Matthew had his head down on his arms, paying no attention.  He looked like he had a hangover or was totally despondent.  All the people either ignored him, or sneered at him.  And Jesus, looking around, looking around…wonders out loud, “Who is the last one?”  And suddenly he turns around and says abruptly “…and Matthew.” 

And the whole crowd says “Matthew?!  Are you nuts?”  But Matthew perks up, looks at Jesus and says, “Who, me?  You want ME to follow you?  Don’t you know who I am?  Don’t you know what I’ve done?”  And Jesus says “Yes, I want YOU Matthew.  C’mon, let’s go.  I have work for you to do, I have kingdom work for you to do.  I want you to be with me.  Your life matters, it counts.”  And he went with him.   He is mighty to save…saves us FROM…but also saves us TO.

He will take great delight in you.  “Delight” is one of those words I love, because we have not (yet) ruined it…like “gracious” or “graceful.”  But DELIGHT…for me, there are connotations of great delight or pleasure.  What do you take great delight in?  Think about it.  Not just what do you like, or is okay…but what do you delight in?  When I asked myself that question, I thought, “I delight in my kids.”  In Jesse, and Nick, and Dana.  They make me laugh when nobody else can.  Of course, I don’t delight in every single thing they DO!  But as people, they delight me, I love to be around them.  Sometimes when we’re together, maybe we’ve rented a movie and we’re all sitting there, focused on the movie, I’ll sit back and just look at them.  And this little smile creeps on my face for no reason.  They bring delight to me. 

Now…can you believe, friends, that someone would actually feel that way about YOU?  Do you believe there is someone who actually takes delight in you, in who you are?  And can you believe that is how GOD feels about you?  God takes delight in you.  You bring a smile to the face of God.  He will take great delight in you.

He will quiet you with his love.  Like Mark talked about with the kids.  I think about a baby crying.  In fact, we had one for a baptism not too long ago.  Not just cry…but erupt, go crazy.  I thought about how a baby does that, how they work themselves into a fit, a lather so hard they can’t even breath anymore, and it escalates.

Everything you do to comfort seems to make it worse.  You try to lullaby the baby, and the screams grow louder and louder.  You walk the baby around and it escalates.  You try feeding the baby a bottle, and it takes it as a personal insult.  You’ve all seen it.  And eventually some person comes along:  dad, mom, grandma, babysitter.  And they take that baby in their arms…all red-faced with rigid body…and slowly over time, the person begins to sing softly, or blow a little on its face, and eventually the baby begins to quiet just a little…even thinks about taking a breath in between screams.  And slowly, slowly the body relaxes.  

We are like that.  We get so worked up about life…about how we are doing at work, or who we are in relationships with, or how we’re performing or comparing against someone else.  We get pretty worked up, and God comes to us and says, “Shh.  I want to quiet you, I want you to rest in my love, I want you to be secure under the shadow of my wing.”  Martin Luther said about this little phrase, “God will cause you to be silent so that you may have in the secret places of your heart a very quiet peace, and a very peaceful silence.”  He will quiet you with his love.

He will rejoice over you with singing.   [That’s great timing for that baby to shout!] Sing, shout, proclaim. Rejoice.  Again I tried to think for myself, when have I welled up with rejoicing?  I thought back to when Anne and I were dating and thinking about getting engaged.  That was a big, huge decision for me, and I didn’t want to make any rash decisions, so I prayed and said, “God, this is huge…I don’t want to mess this one up.  So I’m going to wait, God, until I hear very specifically from you … that this is the right thing to do.” So I waited…and then I waited…and then I waited some more.  A couple months went by, actually. 

And one day I was walking across the campus at the University of Washington with a backpack full of books, and I thought about Anne.  And this enormous wave began to well up inside me.  It started in my stomach, up through my chest to my head, and put this very silly-looking grin on my face, and I just felt like shouting.  I just had to let it out.  All of the sudden, it was clear and I was SO happy, and in fact I just began to laugh out loud.  And I thought, “What do these people walking by me think?!”  That’s how God feels about you…he will rejoice over you with singing.  That’s how he feels about you…and it’s not even because of who you are, but because of who God is.  He rejoices and exults and it wells out of him to the people he made and loves.  And it falls on us, and it causes God to smile again.

Somebody asked me, as we read an Old Testament passage like this one: “How can we know…that the words and promises of the Old Testament apply to ME?”  I mean, this was a long time ago.  We think Zephaniah wrote back around 620 BC.  How do I know it applies to ME?  That’s a great question…and a complicated answer.  But my first thought was, “Well, do these things come true in Christ?  Do they come true in Jesus?  Let’s start there.”   So I walked down through this verse:

The Lord your God is with you: And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.

He is mighty to save: You shall call his name Jesus, for he shall save his people from their sin.  Jesus’ actual name means “save.”

He will take great delight in you:  I thought of Jesus telling the story of the prodigal son, and I wish I could’ve seen his face as he told this story of the father welcoming the wayward son, actually running, unabashedly, with his robes flapping and dust flying, going after his son.

He will quiet you with his love:  and I thought of all the images of Jesus as a shepherd, taking care of his sheep, going after them, knowing their name, leading them to places where their needs are met, where there is fresh water and green grass.

He will rejoice over you with singing:  and I thought again of Jesus’ teaching of the parables of things lost, the lost sheep and the lost coin.  And how he talked about the rejoicing that goes on in heaven over just one person who turns back to God.

And so I look at this verse, and I say, “These all come true in Jesus.”  They all come true for us in Jesus.  That’s one reason we need to read the scriptures over and over and over again.  These things are hard to believe, and we need them to become part of  us, we need to be able to say, “You know what? This is how God feels about me, I don’t understand it, I didn’t earn it, but this is how God feels about me.”

I want to leave you with one other story.  I think I told this to the men’s retreat last fall, but it’s a wonderful story. 

A few years ago I took a group of people to Washington DC, and we were there for the National Day of Prayer.  There was a celebration, a gathering in the Senate office building, and there was a whole day of prayer,  a whole lineup of speakers and worship leaders and singing and prayers.  One of the speakers that day was John Ashcroft.  He’s the Republican senator from Missouri, in fact, an early candidate for president this year.

Ashcroft told us the story of the first time he was elected to the Senate.  He gathered family and friends in a house nearby the Senate on the day he was to be sworn into office.  They decided that they wanted to pray for him before the big event, and so John Ashcroft knelt down in the middle of the living room with his family and friends gathered around him. 

His dad was there as well.  He was fairly frail, had some health problems and was getting up in years.  He had been in ministry for years, was a very godly man.  As people gathered around, John looked over and saw his dad still seated on a low, deep couch.  And as he looked, he saw his dad sort of throwing his arms forward, and realized that his dad couldn’t get up off the couch.  His heart went out, and he said, “Dad, you don’t have to get off the couch to come stand over me and pray.”  And his dad said “Actually, John, I’m not trying to get up so I can stand over you and pray.  I’m trying to get up so I can come kneel beside you and pray with you.”   

What Ashcroft told us…and in fact, that was the last time his dad was with him…he died that very same night.  But he told us that what he learned from that was that some dads dealt with their sons eyeball to eyeball, and others nose to nose…he said, “but in the end, my dad dealt with me knee to knee.”

That’s a beautiful picture, a beautiful picture for this Father’s Day.  But it’s an even better picture for how God feels about us.  A great picture of God’ heart, that in Jesus God would come to us humbly and quietly and faithfully to be alongside of us.  That’s how God feels about you and me.

“The Lord your God is with you.    He is mighty to save.
He will take great delight in you. He will quiet you in his love.
He will rejoice over you with singing.”  

Let’s pray.