Standing Firm When Few Are Standing With You
A sermon for Trinity 2
As I warned, my posting is down this month. For I have been as busy as expected, but it is a good busy.
One thing I’ve been busy with is preparing a sermon I preached yesterday at Providence Reformed Episcopal Church in Corpus Christi. It is relevant both to a book I am working on and to Live Not by Lies by
. And it is all too relevant to where church and society may be heading in the West. Enjoy anyway.By the way, I will be preaching again this Sunday at Providence Church, 10am.
——
Psalm 12
Genesis 6: 5-22
Matthew 24: 32-44
“When the Son of Man comes, will He find faith on the earth?”
Luke 18:8
In recent years I’ve been studying the history of Christian thinking on the End Times. I hope eventually to use these studies to write a book, but at my slow pace, Jesus will return first.
Anyway, I’ve found that Christians often cannot resist making predictions about when Jesus is returning and who the AntiChrist will be — or is already — and any number of details of when and how the End of the Age will come about. Of course, those who cannot resist proclaiming their predictions have been proven wrong again and again. Sometimes it is amusing. Sometimes it is tragic as many are led astray.
So one thing I have learned is that one should be very cautious about making predictions about how unfulfilled prophesy will be fulfilled. That is part of being ready for Christ’s return as we see in the 2nd Lesson this morning from Matthew. We have the humility to believe Jesus when he said, “You must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an hour you do not expect.” We believe He is coming and prepare, but we do not presume to know when He is coming. That is quite different than presuming we know when Jesus will return and then preparing for our presumption to somehow be true.
We would be wise to prepare for whenever and however Christ choses to bring this Age to a close. Jesus exhorts us to do just that, to be ready. So we should be wise and prepare for possibilities.
This morning I want to present to you a possibility. It is a possibility that I think is backed up by Scripture. But please do not take this sermon as a prediction. I believe that Christ “shall come again with glory to judge both the quick and the dead.” But I do not presume to know many details of that nor its timing and neither should you.
At the same time, we should be aware that how God acts in history and today and in the future is usually in line with how he has acted before. A year of sermons could be preached on that! The blood of lambs guarded the homes of the Hebrews during the Passover; the blood of the Lamb saves us by taking away the sins of the world. God then saved them through the waters of the Red Sea; God saves us through the waters of baptism. Moses, representing the Law, could not lead them into the Promised Land; instead it was Joshua — which in Hebrew is Yeshua, which later in Greek is Jesus — it was Yeshua who led them into the Promised Land; it is Yeshua, Jesus, who leads us into the Promised Land of His Kingdom. And we could go on and on about how God’s dealings in the Old Testament are a pattern for his dealings in the New Testament and today and in the future.
Jesus himself said a number of times that this is the case, including in our second lesson when he said, “For as were the days of Noah, so will be the coming of the Son of Man.” So let’s pay attention to how God dealt with the world in the time of Noah.
God allowed the world to get more and more wicked to the point that He only found Noah and his family worthy to be saved. (Or at least most of his family was worthy, and none of them were perfect, but I won’t get into the details of that.) At that point of great and prevailing wickedness, He flooded the world, but saved Noah and his family.
God could have judged the world earlier. But He was patient and gave abundant opportunity for repentance. So He waited until evil prevailed more and more until there was just one righteous family left. Then he judged.
Now one could say — mistakenly I think — that this was an outlier and not a pattern. After all, didn’t God promise not to flood the world again? But let’s look at how He later dealt with Sodom.
One of my favorite Bible chapters is Genesis 18. One reason is the dialogue between Abraham and God in the last ten verses. Abraham had figured out the God was about to judge Sodom, and he was worried about his nephew Lot there in the city. So Abraham negotiates with God. Now I do not recommend negotiating with God. But the Lord is understanding and merciful and goes along with it. Abraham begins:
“Will you indeed sweep away the righteous with the wicked? Suppose there are fifty righteous within the city. Will you then sweep away the place and not spare it for the fifty righteous who are in it? Far be it from you to do such a thing, to put the righteous to death with the wicked, so that the righteous fare as the wicked! Far be that from you! Shall not the Judge of all the earth do what is just?”
And the LORD said, “If I find at Sodom fifty righteous in the city, I will spare the whole place for their sake.”
And Abraham keeps negotiating. Next, he asks:
“Behold, I have undertaken to speak to the Lord, I who am but dust and ashes. Suppose five of the fifty righteous are lacking. Will you destroy the whole city for lack of five?”
Give Abraham credit for being clever. That’s a good argument. “You aren’t going to destroy Sodom over five people, are you?” Never mind that just five people wasn’t the issue. But God listened with kindness and said, “I will not destroy it if I find forty-five there.”
And Abraham keeps on negotiating and negotiating and he works the Lord down to ten people. If the Lord found only ten righteous people in Sodom, he would not destroy it. Just ten!
Well, guess what? There were not even ten righteous people in Sodom. So God utterly destroyed that evil city. But he delivered Lot first. The angels practically had to drag Lot out of Sodom, but God saved him.
A word about Lot. Scripture calls him a righteous man, and I’ll take God’s word for it. But Scripture never said Lot was particularly smart. The man chose to move to Sodom where he would be surrounded by profoundly vile and evil people. Did Lot really think that would work out well? It’s kind of like moving to San Francisco!
Let’s give Lot credit that he remained somewhat righteous anyway. But let him also be a warning. Be careful where you move to! Exercise some wisdom about who you surround yourself with. Proverbs has a verse or two on that. We would have to move out of this world to avoid sinful people altogether. And God does often place his people in difficult places for his good purposes. But if, say, taking a high paying job requires moving to a sewer of evil, maybe think twice about that.
So what do we see in the Lord’s dealings with the world before the Flood and with Sodom? We see that God is merciful and patient. He waits a long time until the sin of man is ripe and rotten. He waits until the sinfulness of man is prevailing, until there are hardly any righteous people left. Then He judges. But at the same time, he delivers the faithful few.
By the way, anyone who thinks the God of the Old Testament is not patient and merciful — well, I’ll be merciful and just say they need to improve their reading skills.
God does judge and will judge, but he is very merciful and patient about it. As Peter wrote in 2 Peter 3:9, if He does not come and judge immediately, it is because He “is patient towards [us], not wishing for any to perish but for all to come to repentance.”
But let no one presume upon the grace of God. Judgement for sin or even just the natural consequences of sin can come very suddenly. Do not think that just because you’ve gotten away with your sin before, that you will get away with it again.
God does judge. But when he judges, the Lord takes care of his faithful people. Yes, they may experience difficulties. Try building a huge ark with the technology of Noah’s day. Try fleeing for your life on foot from a city about to be nuked like Lot did. And there have been a multitude through the centuries called to join the Holy Army of Martyrs. Yet, even through great difficulties, the Lord takes care of his faithful people.
But take note that the faithful in the world before the flood and the faithful in Sodom were very, very few.
And take note of that cryptic question Jesus asked and left unanswered:
“When the Son of Man comes, will He find faith on the earth?” (Luke 18:8)
Guided by Scripture and tradition, I believe that the church shall prevail to the end of the age — although I sometimes wonder how. But in light of God’s past dealings and in light of Jesus’ unanswered question that seems to beg for an answer, I think we have to prepare for the possibility that the faithful church will eventually become very small and surrounded by great evil, that the faithful will be few and far between before Jesus returns, not unlike the days of Noah.
And the faithful church could become very small in the lifetimes of some here. As for Western society, it is already descending into profound evil. More and more, good is treated as evil and evil is treated as good. I’m not going to go into detail because you already know many of the details, and also there are children present. But outrages are now public policy and even taught in public schools. Children are being indoctrinated with predatory lies and have been for years. And we are facing the consequences as a society.
And if you object, you are smeared, and maybe fired from your job and worse. We are already at the point in the United States where basic common sense is punished, where basic decency is punished. You can even go to prison for defending others from predators as Daniel Penny is finding out.
Now I hope and pray this country comes to its senses before it’s too late. But we should not presume that it will. And if our country does not come to its senses, it will become that much more costly to be faithful. It will become that much more costly to stand firm on the Gospel and on God’s word.
And so I expect the faithful church to shrink. Statistics indicate it is already, but that may accelerate. There is nothing like persecution in both hard and soft forms to run off the fakes, the wimps, and the tag-alongs from the church.
But don’t think that those who remain in the church will all be faithful. Already even evangelical church bodies with a history of orthodoxy have been infiltrated by cheerleaders for societal evil. Just as churches in Germany were taken over by “German Christians”, so-called, who supported the Nazi regime, large evangelical churches and institutions are being taken over by those who time and again further the agendas of prevailing evil regimes more the Kingdom of God. Some of these church leaders ally with those pushing predatory ideologies while attacking Christians who stand firm against these evil ideologies. They often use witness or winsomeness as an excuse to ally with prideful evil. But make no mistake: One does not further the Gospel of Christ by allying with the ideologies of Satan.
Totalitarians use such feckless turncoats as tools to take over churches. It happened in Germany. And the church, both Roman Catholic and Protestant, has never recovered in Germany and is now collapsing. It happened in the Soviet Union. Will it happen in America?
I am not saying the institutional church will go away. But I do think most of the institutional church at least in the United States and the West will eventually become a shell, a shell empty of faithfulness but full of evil. Or as St. Paul put it, “having a form of godliness” but empty of godliness and even “denying the power thereof.”
I would very much like to be wrong about all this, and I may be. And I freely concede any number of people have been so alarmed at the decline of their societies and the corruption of churches in centuries past that they thought The End might be near. Pope Gregory the Great, in the midst of turmoil in Rome around the year 600, thought The End was near. Which may be one reason he sent St. Augustine of Canterbury to England. Gregory thought the time for evangelization was short; so evangelizing the nations was a priority for him. Even if the End is not near today as it was not near then, we should follow Gregory’s good example and make evangelism an urgent priority.
Whatever the future holds, we need to pray for our country and for the church. We love our country even as we may deplore its direction. And we serve the same Lord who brought Ninevah to repentance back from the brink of destruction. We serve the same Lord who restored the nation of Judah from exile. He can bring America and the church in America to repentance and restoration as well.
But I look at patterns of how God acts in history, patterns Jesus said we should pay attention to; I look at how our society and churches are doing; and I think we have to get ready to be faithful when very few around us are. Because that may be where we are heading in the lifetimes of some in this room.
So how do we get ready? I’ve been accused of paying too much attention to sports, so I’m hesitant to use sports analogies, but I’m doing to do so anyway.
You can have all the tools to get strong and ready for competition. You can have a good diet plan. You can have a good equipment, perhaps good work out equipment or a membership at a gym. You can have good books about the rules and techniques of your sport. You can even be fortunate and have a natural talent for your sport. You can have access to a good coach who can teach you the sport. And these are all good things to have.
But guess what? All those will not do you any good if you do not actually work out and if you do not practice your sport.
With this being Father’s Day weekend, I am watching hours upon hours of the U. S. Open in golf. I love that tournament. And I know a lot about golf. But if I tried to play that hard golf course they are playing, I would look silly, even if I happened to have a lot of talent for golf. Why would I look silly? Because I haven’t picked up a golf club in years.
We have the riches of Scripture. We can even have Bibles and studies on our smart phones now. Since we are Anglican, we have also excellent Prayer Books, which are mostly Scripture by the way. We have something better than natural talent; if we are baptized and believe in Jesus, we have the Holy Spirit living within us as we celebrated back on Pentecost Sunday. We have excellent teachers available to us as we do in this parish and elsewhere. We may be a small church but we punch above our weight when it comes to good teaching.
But if you are so lazy or distracted that you don’t get into Scripture, if you don’t spend time in prayer, if you don’t put into practice what you are taught, then do you really think you will do well when things get real? Do you really think you will be ready to be faithful when faithfulness is costly and opposed?
We should always be ready to be faithful and serve God when it might hard to do so. How much more should we be ready when both Scripture and the signs of the times warn us that we may be going into hard and lonely times to be a Christian.
So get ready! Start getting ready now! Work out! Work out your faith by Bible reading, by prayer, by serving the church and loving others.
And on this Father’s Day, let me say us men especially need to step up. You fathers have sons and daughters looking up to you. But those who are not fathers have little brothers and sisters, nieces and nephews and younger friends looking up to you.
What do they see? Do those who look up to you see a man who loves Jesus, studies Scripture diligently, prays regularly, and strives to live out His faith? Do those who look up to you see a man of faith and of courage?
Do you want courageous sons and daughters who will be faithful even in hard times? Do you want faithful courageous little brothers and sisters? Then you model it for them. You be a faithful courageous man.
No, you’re not going to be perfect. So you model how to handle that, too. Admit when you’re in the wrong and apologize and get back on the right path. Trust in Christ’s forgiveness and look to Him for help to live right. Children need to see that, too, from their fathers. And it can really win the heart of a child to hear her father say, “I was wrong. I’m sorry. Forgive me.”
That can take some courage, too, does it not?
To say much more about how to prepare to be faithful when few around us are and when society opposes us would take a series of sermons or studies. . . . Which happens to be what we are beginning to do on Sunday afternoons. We are about to study Rod Dreher’s book, Live Not by Lies. This book looks at where our society is going and how to prepare and be faithful in it. We are not meeting today. But, God willing, we will meet next Sunday at 3pm at my place. Feel free to come, especially you fathers and future fathers.
One thing Dreher emphasizes is the importance of faithful families and small groups. When society is decadent and hostile, we need alternative small Christian societies, particularly families. But read the book Live Not by Lies for more on that and come join us.
But more important than that, we should not become discouraged by what is happening to our society and even to the institutional church. We need to always keep the big picture and the big future in mind. At the risk of giving a spoiler alert, guess what you find out about the future if you read the end of the Bible, the last chapters of the Book of Revelation?
We win. God and his people win. Not only does the Bible say He shall reign forever and ever, it says they shall reign forever and ever. “They” includes us who are faithful! Christ wins the victory, but out of his great grace, he shares that victory with us! St. Paul affirmed that when he wrote to Timothy in his second letter saying, “If we endure, we shall also reign with Him.”
Not only can we rejoice in that always, but we can take courage during difficult times. For we know who wins in the end. And we know He shares His victory with us.
So let us prepare to be faithful and courageous men and women of God no matter what the future holds, no matter how much Satan and this world opposes us. If we are persecuted, then we are persecuted. But still a glorious victory awaits us if we are faithful to the End. For Christ has won the victory for us.
So let us prepare. Let us take courage. Let us be faithful.
Let us pray.
O Lord, who never failest to help and govern those whom thou dost being up in thy steadfast fear and love; Keep us, no matter how few we may become on this Earth, keep us, we beseech thee, under the protection of thy good providence, and make us to have a perpetual fear and love of thy holy Name; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.