Search This Blog

Thursday, June 12, 2014

One on One

This is the message from the WOW! (Worship on Wednesday) service at the Gettysburg United Methodist Church on June 11, 2014.  The Bible verses used are 2 Corinthians 3:4-18.


            A lot of you probably know John, Chapter Three, Verse Sixteen, right?  “For God so loved the world that he gave his only his only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but shall have eternal life.”  That’s a great verse, obviously.  Some would say it’s the greatest verse in the Bible.  God sent the divine Son, Jesus Christ, into this earthly world specifically and purposefully to die so that our sins could be forgiven.
            But that’s not what we’re going to talk about tonight.  Well, it kind of is, but we’re going to approach it a different way.  I was reading the Bible one time, and I noticed that a lot of the books of the New Testament have a Chapter Three, Verse Sixteen, and an awful lot of them are really meaningful.  
Now, I don’t know what that means.  In fact, I don’t know that it means anything at all.  It could just be a coincidence.  After all, every book of the Bible does not have a great verse in Chapter Three, Verse Sixteen.  In fact, some books don’t even have a Chapter Three, Verse Sixteen.  But when I was noticing this, I thought, “Hey, there’s an idea for a sermon series!”
So, what we’re going to do on these Wednesday nights is look at Chapter Three, Verse Sixteen in a lot of different books of the New Testament.  And we’re going to start with Second Corinthians Chapter Three, Verse Sixteen.  “But whenever anyone turns to the Lord, the veil is taken away.”
Now, maybe you’re thinking “Well, that’s not much of a deal.”  And taken out of context like that, it’s not much of a deal.  So let’s put it into some context so we can see what the deal is about it.
“Whenever anyone turns to the Lord, the veil is taken away.”  A little earlier in this passage, and we read it a little while ago, the Apostle Paul, who wrote this, tells what that veil is that he’s referring to.  It’s a reference to Moses.
Moses, of course, was the greatest prophet of all time.  He’s the one who led the people of Israel out of slavery in Egypt.  And he talked to God directly.  Moses would go into the presence of God.  And when he left God’s presence, there’d be this unearthly glow about him.  Especially in his face, we’re told that Moses’ face was radiant with this divine glow.  And frankly, it scared the heck out of everybody.  So the people made Moses put something over his face, this veil, so they could not see this unreal, unearthly glow that he had.
And this veil came to symbolize the relationship God had with people.  At that time, God did not have a relationship with the average, ordinary person.  God’s word was not available to everybody.  God only spoke to certain people, prophets and priests.  And only those certain people could speak to God, too.
You know, we take prayer for granted sometimes.  We just assume that we can pray to God any time we want to, and that God will be available to us and will hear our prayer.  And that’s true, but it was not always that way.  In Moses’ time, if someone wanted to talk to God, they went to Moses, and Moses would relay the message.  
And of course, if you were going to bother either Moses or God with something, it had to be something pretty important.  You would not ask for just ordinary day-to-day help.  It had to be something really urgent, almost a matter of life and death, before you would think of making a request to God.
In other words, the common, ordinary person did not have a personal relationship with God at that time.  There was no thought that God loves me as an individual.  I mean, God loved the Nation of Israel and would protect it.  And God might love a specific great prophet like Moses.  But there was no thought that God loved ordinary people, that God would love Harley Smidlap or Joe Shlabotnik.  
After all, God was God.  God was way up there, somewhere, great and powerful and almighty.  The people of Israel were just happy that God cared about them as a whole.  That God might care about the average person was beyond their comprehension.
The reason there was no relationship between God and the average person was because of sin.  God is perfect.  God is sinless.  The prophets were, well, not perfect or sinless, but they were considered pretty close.  And besides, they’d been touched by God.  I mean, again, Moses had this unearthly glow around him every time he’d touch with God.  People figured, well, that had to purify Moses somehow, right?  So yeah, Moses could have a relationship with God.  But the average, sinful person could not.  Our sin simply made for too big of a difference, too big of a gap, too big of a separation between us and God.
And then Jesus came.  And Jesus clearly had this one-on-one relationship with God.  That’s why people who did not know who Jesus was figured he must be a prophet.  He had to be a prophet.  Who else could have that kind of a relationship with God?
But Jesus said no.  God is not just the God of the Prophets.  God is not just the God of the Nation as a whole.  God is your God.  You, and you, and you.  And me.  God is available to each and every one of us.
Jesus said each and every one of us can have a personal relationship with God.  And people said, well, how can that be?  How can we sinful people have a relationship with the perfect sinless God?
And Jesus said, I’ll show you.  And then he died.  But of course that’s not really accurate.  Jesus did not just die.  Jesus allowed himself to be killed.  He allowed himself to be killed as punishment for a crime that he was not guilty of, for sins he did not commit.  He took the punishment that should have gone to you and to me, for our sins.
And when Jesus did that, he took away that gap that existed between us and God.  It went away.  Jesus, by dying and by rising into heaven, made it possible for you and me to have that one-on-one relationship with God.  That’s what Paul is talking about when he says, “Whenever anyone turns to the Lord, the veil is taken away.”  
When we have faith in Jesus Christ as our Savior, when we believe in him, we don’t have to be afraid of God any more.  We don’t have to feel like God could not possibly care about an ordinary person like you or me.  We can know that God does care.  God does love Harley Smidlap and Joe Shlabotnik.  And God loves you.  And God loves me.
And that’s how this relates back to John Chapter Three, Verse Sixteen.  God loved the world so much that God sent the divine Son, Jesus Christ, into this earthly world specifically and purposefully to die so that our sins could be forgiven.  And when that happened, our relationship with God was restored.  The veil, the separation between us and God, is gone.
You and I can pray to God any time we want to.  God will be available to us and will hear our prayer.  But we should never take that for granted.  Our relationship with God is not something that God owes to us.  It’s not something we deserve.  It’s not something we could ever earn.  It’s something that God gives us as a gift.  
But even though that relationship is a gift to us, it was not free.  We were able to get that gift only because Jesus paid the price for it.  We say all the time that Jesus died to save us and give us eternal life, and that’s true, but there’s more to it than that.  Jesus did not die just to save us.  Jesus did not even die just to give us eternal life.  Jesus died so we could come to know God personally.  Jesus died so we could have a personal, one-to-one relationship with God.  
Jesus died so we could pray to God about everything.  Big things.  Small things.  Things that affect the world.  Things that affect our lives.  We can pray for peace, or justice, or courage, or strength, or healing, or any of a hundred other things.  We can do that because Jesus made it possible.  That’s something we should never, ever take for granted.  We should always treasure it for the incredible gift it is.
When you and I turn to the Lord, the veil is taken away.  The gap is closed.  There is no longer anything on earth or in heaven that separates us from the love of God.  God loves us so much that God sent the Son into the world, not to just to save the world, not just to give us eternal life, but to give us a life in which you and I can have a personal, one-on-one relationship with the almighty, sinless, perfect God.  There could be no greater gift on earth or in heaven than that.

No comments:

Post a Comment