Faith Works

We were in the storefront, with very little room, and I was talking to Dave Miller who would be our first building chairman. Through his work the church we had served us well for thirteen years. My son, Matthew, about three at the time, comes walking by. DIt was this time of year, the Sunday after Halloween, when I knew what life had in store for me. Somebody had bought too much candy and decided it would be good to bring it to church for the coffee fellowship for the kids.ave and I keep talking--we don’t even notice him. Then I looked down and the new, white preaching gown I had just got back from the cleaners had a big smudge of chocolate on it. Amazing--I hadn’t even felt the little rat’s hand or face on me. I and Miller both started laughing.

That’s when I knew what my life would bring.

Faith Works

1.Will I meet him with my head in the clouds?

2.Or with chocolate smudges on my robe?

We come across another leader of God’s people in our text for today, a king of Judah named Asa. He was a good king. “He commanded Judah to seek the Lord, the God of their fathers, and to obey his laws and commands. He removed the high places and incense altars in every town in Judah, and the kingdom was at peace under him. He built up the fortified cities of Judah, since the land was at peace. No one was at war with him during those years, for the Lord had given him rest. ‘Let us build up these towns,’ he said to Judah, ‘and put walls around them, with towers, gates and bars. The land is still ours, because we have sought the Lord our God; we sought him and he has given us rest on every side.’ So they built and prospered (4-7).”

Here is a king who enjoys a time of peace. There are only minor skirmishes between cranky border guards along the northern border with Israel. He could have sat back and counted his money. He could have told everybody to take out a second and buy seashore cottages and get into surfboarding. But he didn’t.

He told them to get their house in order. He commanded his people to get rid of the ramshackle nature worship that had crept in under the guise of worshipping the Lord. He told them to worship God the way God wanted to be worshipped, with sacrifices in the Temple at Jerusalem and with holy lives and ready ears to hear the Word taught in their towns and villages.

But he didn’t stop there. As King Asa felt responsible for the spiritual welfare of his people he felt a heavy burden for their physical safety. There were lots of villages in Judah that, over the years, had become towns. There were enough people and possessions in them to make them attractive targets for raiders or invaders. So he and his people did the back-breaking work of building walls around these towns. We gripe when we’ve got to hire someone to build walls around our property with pre-cast blocks that machines bring in. How would you like to be digging up rocks and loading them onto donkey carts, lifting them into place and hoping the mortar dried quickly? Some of the cities had out-grown their walls so walls had to be extended, while other city walls needed renovation.

Asa knew the Lord had given them this time of peace to do the hard work of necessary for the spiritual and physical welfare of his people. His faith in the Lord worked, it worked hard. He wasn’t going to be content to have his head in the clouds. His calloused hands had dirt and sand under their fingernails.

And then the day came when all that hard work paid off. Pharaoh, King of Egypt, send his general, Zerah, to plunder Judah. Large as Asa’s conscripted army was, the Egyptians couldn’t be numbered, and they had three hundred chariots, the killing machines of their day.

“Then Asa called to the Lord his God and said, ‘Lord, there is no one like you to help the powerless against the mighty. Help us, O lord our God, for we rely on you, and in your name we have come against this vast army. O Lord, you are our God; do not let man prevail against you (11).’”

And the Lord heard King Asa’s humble plea and gave Judah the victory. The powerless plundered the mighty. The few pursued the many. So great was Egypt’s defeat that it would be almost three hundred years before they confronted a king from Judah again.

Faith works. King Asa’s faith worked hard in peacetime and it worked in a time of crisis, in a time of war.

There is a part of each one of us that longs for an easy life, a tranquil life. The gals want romance kisses that last for days and midnight dances in the south of France. Later in the month the guys want a belly full of turkey and a television filled with football. We’d like to think about God, contemplate our faith, and pretty much leave it at that. Religious. Spiritual. Head in the clouds type of people thinking heavenly thoughts.

But that’s not faith. That’s a false faith. That’s a faith that looks at the suffering of this world and says, “Why doesn’t somebody (else) do something about it, so I won’t feel so embarrassed by these people?” False faith judges everything and everyone and never lifts a finger to help lift the burdens of soul or body. False faith gets people all riled up about something, but then never does the nitty-gritty detail work to harness that concern and energy to fix whatever they got riled up about.

Even the pagans realized that. Word are cheap. Actions count.

How will I meet my Lord when this fleeting life is over? With my head in the clouds and all the deep thoughts I have thunk and the causes I thought about looking into? Will I meet him as an absentee landlord to the responsibilities of my life, the children he was counting on me to raise, the neighbors he was counting on me to look after? Will I meet him as the ardent churchgoer who never wanted to look dumb by trying to sing even singable songs, who never joined his heart with the preacher’s heart in even thinking about prayers spoken, and never realized Jesus was counting on me to encourage brothers and sisters in the faith to keep walking in the way of the Lord?

Or will I meet him with chocolate smudges on my robe?

Jesus was smudged. Long nights in prayer, long days in teaching, preaching and doing miracles. A long and inglorious death on the cross to pay for all the sins of a respectable world that didn’t want to get its hands dirty. Jesus was smudged by my transgressions. He was mucked up by your iniquities.

Give me the smudges, because that’s what happens when faith works. Give me the wrinkles from worrying about when the kids are going to get home, the rumpled shirts from being in them too long, squeezed in the middle because I didn’t have the leisure to exercise (and the few times I did my reflexes were so bad, my legs didn’t hurt until the second day) and shoes scuffed from scraping too many curbs as I got out of the car to ring somebody’s doorbell. Give me the faith, Lord, that works hard enough to be dissatisfied with self-assessments that always come back “pretty good.”

And as a pastor of this church, help me strive not only for a worship service where everybody can and does actually sing what is to be sung, but everyone, kids and adults alike, carries home something from the sermons that they can use, so that later in life, when they walk into a pastor’s office for the first time, they can say, “I went to church as a child, but over the years I got away from it and I realize that’s what I’m missing in my life, so I want to start coming to this church.” Give me a church that doesn’t urge its members to run away from their problems but a church that proclaims it is the Lord’s work when our faith works to care for ailing parents, to check homework, to keep in touch with friends who, because of hard times, do not want to be kept in touch with. Give me a faith that faces down my restless fears at night and is ready to meet the dragons at dawn.

Faith Works

1.Will I meet him with my head in the clouds?

2.Or with chocolate smudges on my robe?

And nothing will be neat. And all the strings might have loose ends, as far as we can tell. But we will have dared for the Lord, we will have worked for the Lord, we will have loved and lived. And we will have known it, as all the saints of old discovered. With our God is forgiveness. With our God is courage. With our God is strength. With our God is a faith that works.