Sunday, August 17, 2025

Tenth Sunday after Pentecost
Jeremiah 23:16-29
Psalm 119:81-88
Hebrews 11:17-31, 12:1-3
Luke 12:49-53 (54-56)

‘Am I a God at hand,’ says Yahweh, ‘and not a God afar off?’

“Mom, how did you know?” a child asks. “I have eyes on the back of my head,” she answers. How many mothers have used this line to keep our children on the right path. Despite not being true, mothers do seem to have a sense of knowledge that goes beyond expectation, and children think it is true. We seem to know things we should not know and see things beyond the reasonable scope of our senses. We are not omniscient, but we hope they will think we are so that they will think twice before being disobedient. Mothers are not omniscient because we cannot be everywhere all the time, especially as our children grow older and gain their independence. They eventually grow up and move on. They test the limits of our omniscience during every stage of their growth.

Sadly, we do the same thing with our God. We think that He is like our parents, limited in scope and sight. Historically, cultures have always had gods that were more local with specific focus and abilities, and though they were called gods they were not much more than extraordinary beings that could do things that normal humans couldn’t do. Since we thought they were somehow greater, people looked to them for help and salvation. These local “gods” were convenient because they could be ignored if we were outside their influence. For example, they would not need to deal with a rain god if their weather was perfect.

The Lord God Almighty is greater than human beings, but we often give Him the same limited characteristics of those local gods. We think that we can ignore Him when we do not need anything or hide from Him when we are doing something wrong. However, God is not just a god who is near, like those local gods of the ancients. He is also not a god who is far away. He is not some disconnected being that set the world in motion and then disappeared. He is actively involved in the lives of His people.

When we discount the Lord God Almighty and make Him less than He is, we easily fall prey to those who would use and abuse His power for their own benefit. In Jeremiah’s days there were prophets on every corner, prophets who claimed to know God’s mind and His intensions. They cried, “I had a dream” and interpreted the dream to their advantage. By claiming to have received their message directly from God, they sought to gain power and influence over people. Yet, their message was lacking. It led people astray. It brought people to the altar of false gods and made people forget the Creator and Redeemer God.

How do we tell the difference? There are many people today who claim to be prophets and who say that they have been given a special message from God. These messages often come in the form of dreams, but they also say, “God told me.” While it is important to hear what they have to say, we are to always remember that God’s Word does not contradict itself. In the passage from Jeremiah, God asked, “What is the straw to the wheat?” Straw is part of the wheat; it is the stem that is left after the wheat kernels are taken. Straw has value. It can be used for bedding, for warmth, and for building. Yet, straw is limited. Wheat, on the other hand, is life giving. The kernels can be used for food, or they can be planted to grow more wheat. God’s Word is life giving, but that of the false prophets is not. God’s Word is forgiving, filled with grace and hope and peace. God’s word is demanding and powerful; it is like the hammer that breaks the rock into pieces, but it is also healing and transforming. Most of all, God’s Word reveals His faithfulness.

God isn’t hiding somewhere that He can’t see us. He isn’t so close that we can keep Him under our control. He isn’t so far away that He doesn’t know every hair on our head. God is with us. He is in our hearts and in our lives. We can know the difference between the false prophets and those who are faithfully speaking God’s message to the world. We can know because God’s word brings life and growth and hope.

There is an organization that helps young people develop strong character and life-enhancing values through the game of golf. The First Tee was founded in 1997 and is in partnership with the major golfing organizations. It was created to make golf more affordable and accessible for children. My son began with the First Tee when he was in Elementary School and continued well into his High School years as a coach. As the children progress through the different levels of learning, they become mentors to younger students. The First Tee helped my son grow both as a young man and an athlete. The best part of the program is that it is about more than golf. They learn life lessons that build well rounded lives in the children.

Golf skills are not the primary focus of the organization, but growth in the game is part of the expectation for the children. They are tested as they prepare to move to a new level about the core values and the rules of golf as well as performance in golf like driving, putting and chipping. They check the students for good form and appropriate results for their level. They don’t pass on automatically but are encouraged to continue trying until they accomplish the expectations. Sometimes it takes those extra tries for a student to realize what they are doing wrong. My son struggled to get through a level until he had a revelation about his grip, and then suddenly he was able to send the ball a greater distance with more consistency. It took him some time, through trial and error, to discover the problem, but he improved significantly after practice.

Our scriptures lately have focused on our trust in God and having patience to wait for His will to be clearly known in our life. We looked at Abram and Sarai whose faith in God’s promises gave them a vision of the future that they would never see during their lives. They saw the beginning - the birth of their son Isaac - but they would never see offspring as numerous as the stars in the sky during their lives. Still, they had faith. These stories of faith are amazing, yet we cannot help but wonder if they are historic stories or merely myths to give us confidence in our own spiritual and physical lives.

There is one thing that helps us believe that these saintly, divinely inspired, faithful people were real is that they were not perfect. They failed. They sinned. They even went their own way, sometimes. Abram was given the promise of offspring repeatedly, but he still went to Hagar for a child. In the Hall of Faith in the book of Hebrews, we see over and over again faith people who were less than perfect. Rahab’s morality was questionable. Gideon repeatedly demanded proof from God. Barak tried to do things his own way rather than according to God’s will. Samson fell to the temptress. Jephthah made a deal with God which meant the death of his beloved daughter. David’s indiscretion brought death. The people who crossed the Red Sea did not remain faithful to God. Samuel and the prophets failed in their own ways.

The story of Jericho shows us how patience might mean repetition, experiencing the same things over and over again until we reach the point of trusting God. Would the walls have come tumbling down if the Israelites had played the horns on the first day? No, though those days of marching around Jericho seemed unnecessary, it was a gift from God so they could see how patience and obedience led to great things. In the end, they believed, and the walls fell.

This is the life of faith. We don’t find the right golf grip without trial and error, without going to the driving range regularly to practice. By repetition we learn what we are doing wrong, and we learn how to do it right. Our life of faith is a growing, maturing journey that lasts our entire lifetime. We have an advantage over the Old Testament saints because we have seen the fulfillment of the promises that had been given to them made real in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, but we fail just like they do. We still forget God’s promises and need to be reminded. We still have doubts. We still have so much to learn. We go through the same problems over and over again until we get it right and then God will move us on to a new phase of our journey. He moves us to the next level.

My son was part of the First Tee for a long time, and though he struggled with some of the levels, he eventually reached beyond the last. The local club restructured their program for him, and eventually some other students. He was finished, but not really, because there were always new lessons to learn. He was a coach, but he was still a student, continuing to grow in the sport and in life. Sometimes we think we have reached our pinnacle, both in faith and in our everyday lives, but the reality is that God restructures for us, too. We are never done growing until the day He takes us home. We reach a new phase. We have new responsibilities. We might even become a “coach” or a leader of some sort, but that doesn’t mean we are done. There is always room to grow. Sadly, we will make the same mistakes. We’ll repeat old sins. We will forget that God is near as we go our own way.

There is an old saying that we’ve all heard once or twice: “God will not give you any more than you can handle.” We think this common refrain is scriptural and that it means God will keep us away from the hard moments of life. Ask Jeremiah if God gives people more than they can handle. His life was rough. It was lonely to be persecuted and rejected. Jeremiah remained faithful not because he thought God would take away the difficulty but because he knew that God would get him through. We believe the saying because we want our lives to be easy, but it doesn’t show that we trust in God. It is a claim that we can do everything by our own power. The truth is we can’t. We can never make things right on our own. That’s why we need Jesus. It would be better to say that God will not give you more than He can handle, because it is by His grace that we get through every moment of every day.

God said through Jeremiah that His Word is like fire and Jesus said in the Gospel that He came to bring fire upon the earth. We are uncomfortable with these images because we would much rather think of Jesus as coming to bring peace. However, we are reminded by the stories of the Old Testament saints that the peace of God does not necessarily mean the absence of conflict. Faith in Jesus causes division and brings tension. Those who are passionate about their faith and about Jesus, will stand up for their beliefs under any circumstance, even risking relationships with family and friends.

It is understandable that we wonder when we will know God’s peace when we experience conflict in our world, but this is not peace as God intends. We misunderstand the promises of God, or we put our own expectations on them. That’s what happened with Abram when he turned to Hagar for the promised child. We think we can make God’s peace happen in our way, in our time, not trusting God with patience and obedience. We think we will find peace by fulfilling God’s promises with our own hands, but true joy in God’s kingdom will be found only when we trust that He is the one who fulfills His promises.

Sometimes we will need to face more than we can handle. How did God test Abraham’s faith? He commanded the sacrifice of Isaac, but Abraham trusted God’s promises so much that he willingly took Issac to the altar, knowing that God would make it right in the end. Sometimes we need to parade around our problems over and over again like the people around Jericho until God finally says we can blow our horns that will knock down the walls. We are called by faith to risk the division that might be caused by the Gospel. True peace is found in trusting God and living according to His Word, whatever the risk. God’s peace is not without conflict; it comes to us when we live in trust and hope for God’s promises.

Trusting in God means allowing the fire that dwells within us to burn brightly to light the world in which we live. We are called to be faithful for God’s sake no matter the consequences. We might think that a martyr’s life was not blessed because they died in suffering and pain. Yet they are so often described as having had an unearthly joy and peace come over them in their final moments, even as they were being burned or beheaded. We might ask, “Where is God in their struggle?” He is everywhere. Close enough to know every detail of our flesh and far enough to be outside our control. Near or far, God is with us. He is in our hearts and in our lives. He fills the earth, constantly working in our world to make things right, to reconcile people to Himself and to one another, to heal and grant peace to those who believe.

Last week Jesus warned His disciples to be ready. Ready for what? The religious leaders were already pressing Jesus to catch Him in some crime so that they could be rid of Him. The inevitable end of Jesus’ ministry would be on the cross. Jesus certainly wanted the disciples to be ready for what was soon to come because His passion and death would be trying on them as well. But Jesus constantly reminded them not to be afraid. “They can’t kill you because your Father in Heaven promises to save you.” No matter how wonderful this message sounds to us, there are many who refuse to hear and believe.

This week Jesus told the disciples that He came to throw fire on the earth. This fire separates believers from unbelievers. Jesus divides hearts: some are inflamed with the divine love of God, but others are left cold. The fire is not a fire that destroys, but one that fills the hearts of God’s people with His love. Jesus wishes that it was already burning, but it would take something very radical for it to happen. Jesus had to die on the cross, and then after His resurrection, the Holy Spirit could be thrown upon God’s people, filling them with everything God has promised to those who believe.

Jesus presented the Kingdom of God to the crowds, but they could not see Him as He is. He showed them the signs that pointed to the truth so that they would turn back to God and follow Him as those who walked in faith throughout the ages. Even now too many do not recognize the signs because they expect God to fulfill their expectations rather than be faithful to His truth.

God’s Word is good, and it is the word upon which we can live and dwell in peace not only in this world but for life eternal. The Psalm for today is part of a hymn praising God’s Word. We cringe a little when we see Psalm 119. It is the longest book of the Bible, made up of twenty-two stanzas of law-talk. The same words are repeated over and over again: commandments, precepts, statutes, law, words, mandates, teaching, justice, decrees, testimony, verdict and others. If you compare different translations, they seem to use many of these words interchangeably. We wonder if David could have made his point in much fewer words.

This psalm is lengthy because it is an alphabetic acrostic poem that teaches the concept of the law as the Israelites understood it. Each stanza represents a letter of the alphabet, and each line of each stanza begins in Hebrew with the same letter. and though we can’t see it in English, we know that each line of each stanza begins in Hebrew with the same letter. This type of teaching tool helped children learn the psalm and God’s Word because it was written on their hearts. You can use Psalm 119 as a devotional practice, reading one stanza a day over and over again so that it is written on your heart, too.

We wonder, however, if the repetition and so much law talk is good. Why say the same thing over and over again? We don’t know the Hebrew language to benefit from the poetic form that makes it such a good learning tool. Each stanza has a unique meaning, but they all use the same eight words over and over again. It seems redundant, although each word has a unique meaning: law, words, statutes, promise, testimony, ordinance, judgment, commandments, ways. The biggest problem is that translators often use English translations interchangeably, so we don’t see the distinctions.

Understanding the difference between ordinance (which has to do with religious ritual) and promise (which is focused on God) helps us to see the depth of what the psalmist intends. It isn’t just about obeying some rules, it is about living according to God’s Word from the rules to the promise, all of which establish Him as the authority we are to trust. When we study the words, we realize that the psalm is really a comfort to those of us who trust God because they remind us that God’s Word is more than rules we must obey.

Despite the rain that we’ve had in Texas this year, our area is still suffering a significant drought. This week has been unusual because there have been scattered to isolated showers. The radar might suggest rain is coming, but the shower can disappear. On the other hand, unexpected showers can pop up out of nowhere. I’ve lived in Texas for more than twenty years, and I still do not really recognize the signs of impending weather. Some of it is obvious, but I can’t count on the old wife’s tales I knew when I grew up in Pennsylvania about cows lying down before a rain.

I’ve also noticed that the clouds sometimes look “wet” as if they are about to burst, but then the sun evaporates the water, and they disappear into the big beautiful blue sky. I’ve seen storm clouds that look like they might come our way, but they are miles away and disappear long before they reach our house. Sometimes the storms hit the “bubble” over our city and just fall apart. I am not very good at interpreting the signs.

In the Gospel lesson Jesus said, “You hypocrites! You know how to interpret the appearance of the earth and the sky, but how is it that you don’t interpret this time?” They knew what the temporal signs meant for their lives. Their agricultural livelihood depended on knowing the right time to plant and the right time to reap. The desert heat can be dangerous for travelers who might be on a dusty road for days at a time. Knowing the signs meant the difference between life and death.

We wonder how the people who listened to Jesus could have been so foolish. After all, Jesus did miraculous things; He made a difference in so many lives. How could they reject the Messiah that was standing right in front of them? Well, they had false prophets. They had people claiming to be the Messiah. They had become cynical because the false prophets were never right. Besides, Jesus did not fit into their expectations. He was not the Messiah they thought they were looking for. He was not the Savior they predicted. They couldn’t read the signs because they were looking for all the wrong things. They were like people trying to understand the weather in one place using the signs from another.

They did not know how to interpret the signs. He did many miraculous things, but there were others who seemed to do miraculous things. They missed, or refused to acknowledge, that Jesus did signs that no one else was able to do. Jesus’ miracles were more than supernatural events. His work pointed to the grace of God. He would be faithful to provide the salvation that He promised to those who recognized that Jesus was the One. Too many, even today, put their own spin on those signs, but they have a skewed understanding of God.

We trust in God’s salvation because He has promised that He will save us. When we are let down, we can look to God’s promises. When we struggle with the life we are living in this world, we can see how God’s boundaries will guard and protect us even from ourselves. When we are being persecuted, we can trust that God will provide justice against those who do us harm. Those who are against us are really against God, but God is faithful. Even when the world means to destroy us, we can look to God’s authority for peace. God’s testimony is worth obedience because He will protect us by His mercy.

We are called to live the life of faith in peace that might not seem peaceful. Our passion for Jesus Christ will bring discord, even among our families. The world will not approve of the choices we make. We might suffer, but we show that we trust God by living in faith and obedience to His Word no matter what happens. This means acting as Jesus taught us to act, doing what Jesus commanded us to do. We are to follow in His footsteps, even when the path seems too difficult. The world cannot take the peace we have in Jesus Christ. Persecution will come, perhaps even from those we love, but God provides everything we need to walk in the passion we have for Jesus, especially His presence.

God is always faithful, and His promises are true. He knows what the world is throwing at us, and He knows what we are trying to hide. He knows everything about the past, but He also knows the rest of the story. Despite our failures, He has promised joy and peace to those who trust in Him. So, let us live in faith. He will always be with us, so close that He knows us intimately, but big enough to provide everything we need. There may be many reasons for us to fear and doubt, but God is at hand to fill us with joy and peace.