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Holy Trinity Anglican Orthodox Church
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Joy in God's Service |
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Matthew
22:1 Twentieth
Sunday after Trinity October
17, 2010 The
man without a wedding garment is all about himself. In the story the King is God.
The wedding feast is The Kingdom of God, which we often call
Heaven, but which also includes God's true people on earth. Those who are destroyed are those who oppose the Kingdom,
kill the prophets, and reject God's mercy and forgiveness. The wedding garment is the forgiveness of sins through the
sacrifice of Christ. We need
to remember that God, looked down on the human race in all our misery and
spiritual darkness, and saw us as sheep without a shepherd, lost in sin,
and doomed to continue in our misery and lostness throughout this life,
and all eternity. And in His
unbounded love and power, He Himself came to earth, and lived and died as
a man. But in His death He
bore all the pain and sorrow and cost of our sin.
He bore it in His own flesh, and died for it on the cross. We could look at it this way.
We have dressed our souls in rags.
We have dressed them in good intentions we have never followed
through. We have ripped them
with good things left undone. We
have stained them with bad things we ought not to have done. But Jesus wants to dress our souls in unimaginable splendour.
He does not simply intend to
wash and mend our old garments. He
intends to wash and heal our souls, and to dress us in the spotless,
glimmering righteousness only He can give.
This is the wedding garment of the parable.
The
obvious meaning of the parable is that the man has attempted to sneak into
Heaven in the old rags of his sin rather than the righteousness of God
given through Christ. In
other words, he has attempted to sneak into Heaven without receiving what
God came to earth, and lived and died and rose again to give to us. It
is clear that the man in the parable finds no joy in God.
The things of God are not his joy.
He finds no pleasure in them. To
Him the eternal and absolute moral perfection of God is not truth that
grips his mind and guides his life. It is a boring fact that is unrelated
to anything in his life. To
him the fact that God somehow remained in Heaven guiding and upholding
every subatomic particle of this vast universe, and, at the same time,
entered into this messy, fallen world, to live and die as a man, though
without sin, is not a story of awe inspiring wonder, it is simply another
one of those rather odd stories from that rather odd book people call the
Bible. This man's heart and
soul were unmoved by the wonders of God. It
is clear that the man in the parable finds no joy in serving God.
To him God is a cruel master.
The commandments of God are not the way of life and peace; they are
onerous burdens from which he longs to be free.
To him the worship of God is a boring disruption of the things he
really wants to do, and we can well imagine that his attendance at public
worship is sporadic, and that he only attends when he doesn't have
something "better" to do. In
short, the man is all about himself.
He is willing to accept some of the things of God, but only on his
own terms. The result; he is
thrown back into the state of darkness.
He is put out of the Kingdom of God and allowed to continue in the
things that ruin life and kill the soul. Trinity
Season of our cycle of prayer and worship emphasises the Christian life, a
life lived in grateful response to the grace of God poured out on us in
Jesus Christ. For several
weeks we have been looking at the joy that is ours in God.
To us His dwelling is lovely.
Our heart and our flesh have a longing and a desire to dwell in His
courts. We would rather be a
doorkeeper in His house than to live in luxury and wealth outside of it.
We would rather live one day in His courts than a thousand outside
of it. Great is the Lord and
greatly to be praised. He
is glorious. He is wonderful.
He is worth more to us than everything this world offers.
He is the great joy of our lives. This has been our emphasis. Today
the emphasis shifts. Today we
look at serving God with joy. We
emphasise that His service is done with joy. We are not saying that
serving God brings us joy. It
does, but that is not the point we are trying to make here. The point we
are trying to make is that serving God is something we enjoy in and of
itself. In other words it is
a joy to serve Him. It is a
joy to bring honour to Him, to recognise Him as our God and to live for
Him. It is a joy for us joy
to be a joy to God. We are
all about Him, and being all about Him is something we do joyfully. We are happy to be all about Him. To find our joy in God is to seek Him because He makes us
happy. Serving Him with joy
is to seek Him because it makes Him happy. Let
me try one more time to explain my point.
There is great satisfaction in the service of God. Do you remember
what Jesus said when the disciple brought food to Him after He spoke to
the woman at the well? He
said He had meat they did not know about.
He said, His meat is to do the will of His Father.
There is a verse, Isaiah 53:11, that pictures our Lord Jesus Christ
with His people after the time of this physical universe is ended.
It pictures Christ looking over the millions of people who have
been rescued from the jaws of hell, who are now safe with Him in Heaven,
that wonderful place where there is no more sorrow, or suffering or death,
where all is joy forever and ever, and He looks back to the cross, and the
terrible price He paid, and He remembers all the suffering He endured to
make their home in Heaven possible, and the Bible says He sees the travail
of His soul and is satisfied. I
am trying to say that serving God brings a deep satisfaction to our souls.
There are times when the service of God is difficult.
There are times when we fall into temptation and sin.
There are times when the cross seems too heavy for us.
There are times when we feel we are being overcome, rather than
overcoming. And yet, there is
a satisfaction in the service of Christ that is better and higher than
anything else in this world. There
is a joy in His service that cannot be diminished or taken away.
There is not always mirth in serving God, but there is always joy.
And so, we pray; "O
almighty and most merciful God, of thy bountiful goodness keep us, we
beseech thee, from all things that may hurt us; that we, being ready both
in body and soul, may cheerfully
accomplish those things which thou commandest; through Jesus Christ our
Lord. Amen."
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