Introduction
There’s
a nice little story about an Archbishop who was visiting one of his vicars in
his home and before the Archbishop arrived the vicar though he’d give his
little girl some guidance on how to address their guest. “Now don’t forget,” he
said. “before you say anything else to him, say “Your Grace.” So as soon as the
Archbishop walked into the room, she said, “For what we are about to receive
may the Lord make us truly thankful.”
We
use the word grace to describe the movement of a dancer, we choose it as a
girl’s name, it comes up in many expressions; grace and favour homes are
properties that the Queen offers rent-free. We talk of falling from grace,
saving grace, putting on airs and graces, and when we hear of someone who has
messed up their life we say “there but for the grace of God go I…”
I
wonder what the word “grace” means to you when you close your eyes and think
about it? What does it say to you? What kind of thoughts – or feelings – come
into your heart when you hear this word, “grace”?
Grace
is a word you virtually never hear in any other religion. Hindus don’t use it.
Sikhs don’t use it. Muslims don’t either and neither do Buddhists or anyone
else. Even Jews rarely speak of the grace of God. But our Christian hymn books,
our worship albums and New Testaments are replete with this word – it is
essentially Christian.
I
quoted the Manhattan-based church leader Tim Keller the other week and I’m
going to do so again; this is something else he said recently and it fits the
theme of our Bible reading today. He said, “The more you see your own flaws and
sins, the more precious, electrifying, and amazing God’s grace appears to you.”
Do
you feel God’s grace as something precious, electrifying, and amazing?
Do
you think the person sitting next to you this morning would like you more or
like you less if they knew everything about you? I don’t think you’d like me
any better if you knew all that God knows about me. But have you ever stopped
to think that God knows every thought
you think, every word you say, and every action you take, past present and
future, and it doesn’t diminish one bit the love he has for you.
Grace
means that God doesn’t love us because we’re good. It means he loves us because
he is good.
So
how bad do you think you have to be in order to lose hope of a future with God?
I sometimes hear it said that some people are beyond the pale. Something will
come up in the news that seems to reach a new low and people say, “That’s it,
that’s gone too far.” The Moors murderers. The Jamie Bulger case. The
kidnapping, forced conversion and marriage of those schoolgirls in Nigeria.
ISIS. How disgustingly awful is it possible to be and yet still be able to get
right with God?
Manasseh – the Worst
King of Judah
Meet
King Manasseh of Judah, who our first reading was about. Some kings in the
Bible are very well known – many people outside the Church have heard of David
and Solomon for example.
Then
there are some quite good ones who stand out and therefore might register in
the memory of your average churchgoer; kings like Hezekiah and Josiah.
Then
there are kings that virtually no one has heard of or knows anything about –
usually bad ones who reign only a short time like Pekahiah and Shallum. How
much can anyone tell me about those two?
Manasseh
is probably not one of the best known kings in the Bible though I suspect some
of you will know a bit about him. Of the 42 kings and 1 queen of Israel and
Judah listed in the Old Testament, Manasseh has the distinction of holding two
records among them. Firstly, and this is an accolade he now shares with Queen Elizabeth
II for our country, he reigned the longest of all (occupying the throne for 55
years).
Secondly,
a distinction he possibly shares with King John for our country, he was the
worst of the lot.
Manasseh
was, of all the kings of Judah, the most wretched. This is what the 2 Kings 21
and 2 Chronicles 33 say about him:
·
It
says he was involved with astrology and spiritist mediums in defiance of God’s
commands.
·
It
says he placed phallic symbols of the fertility god Baal and a statue of the
sex goddess Asherah right in the middle of God’s Temple.
·
It
says he was involved with devil worship, sacrificing his own children in the
fire in a satanic ritual.
·
It
says, besides his own sinful heart, he led his people astray into practices of
evil.
·
It
says he was an indiscriminate murderer. A despot. He drenched Jerusalem with
innocent blood.
Manasseh’s
reign was a calculated attempt to replace the God of Israel with a cult of sex
and violence. It says “The Lord spoke to Manasseh and his people, but they paid
no attention.”
The
books of Isaiah and Zephaniah tell us more about that. The prophet Isaiah lived
during Manasseh’s reign and he spoke out about what was going on but Manasseh had
him silenced, banning him from speaking in public. Time and again, Isaiah warned
him “What you’re doing are the very things the Canaanites did before us and
that is why God removed them from this land.” But Manasseh just blanked him and
carried on and, in fact, he ramped it up even more just to provoke him.
In
the end, when Manasseh couldn’t stand the sound of Isaiah any more, he hollowed
out a tree trunk, had Isaiah bound and placed him inside it, then gave the order
to have it sawn in two.
The
verdict: it says Manasseh exceeded the evil of the original Canaanites. That is
staggering. God had expelled the Canaanites to make room for his holy people
and now, thanks to Manasseh, they were actually worse than the society they had replaced.
He
was a thoroughly violent and truly horrible man.
What
was it about Manasseh that made him such a bad king, the worst of all? What
went wrong? Was it maybe his environment and his upbringing? Can we blame his
parents or his education? Did someone corrupt him?
We
sometimes try and account for someone’s terrible crimes by pointing out that
they were led astray and were themselves abused. Let’s look at that…
His
father was King Hezekiah, who the Bible says was one of the very best kings of
all. So he can’t blame his dad. His mother was called Hephzibah and Jewish
history records that she was none other than the daughter of the prophet
Isaiah. So with one of the greatest kings for a father and one of the greatest
prophets for a maternal grandfather he could hardly say his family had driven
him to it.
He
had it all; he had a good gene pool, a nice upbringing, he would have been
trained in godliness from birth, he had money, the position, lineage... he was
born for greatness. No one can say there were mitigating circumstances and that
it wasn’t his fault. It was.
On
29 July 1949 the Stanford Daily News in
Palo Alto California carried a report with a photo of a 55 year-old local man called
Jack Wurm who was walking along a beach in nearby San Francisco when he came
across a sealed bottle with a piece of paper in it.
He
opened the bottle and read the note, and discovered that it was the last will
and testament of Daisy Singer Alexander, heiress to the Singer sewing machine
fortune. The note read as follows: "To avoid confusion, I leave my entire
estate to the person who finds this bottle and to my lawyer, Barry Cohen, to share
and share alike."
There
are two things to say about this: 1) Why anyone would leave half their estate
to their lawyer is anyone’s guess but there you are. 2) Why anyone would leave
the other half to some random stranger is also a bit weird and sure enough Jack
Wurm thought it was probably a hoax. In fact it took the courts until after Barry
Cohen and Jack Wurm’s death to finally decide on its authenticity. Had it been
judged authentic in their lifetime it would have been worth to each of them over
$6 million in cash and $80,000 annual income from Singer shares.
And
yet that wouldn’t even begin to compare with the spiritual inheritance Manasseh
had from his family and line! And he turned his back on the whole lot. It’s
like finding that bottle, realising it’s a valid will and testament and then burning
it in a bonfire before showing anyone.
So
Manasseh couldn’t blame his environment or his upbringing. None of us can. We
are all, as Simon Ponsonby has said, “sindividuals.”
But
the Lord loves the least, and the last, and the lost. Rabbi Aaron the Great
used to say, “I wish I could love the greatest saint like the Lord loves the
greatest sinner.”
And
God does love the greatest sinner. You cannot go too low, you cannot stray too
far, you cannot be too lost for the reach of God’s grace to be insufficient.
The
big question to ask is not can God save someone else, but, can God save me?
What about you today? Do you ever feel as if you have done some terrible act
that God will not forgive? Do you feel sometimes like you do not deserve the
mercy of God? Whatever you’ve done, however recent or long ago, however
culpable you were, let me assure you that God has the means and the motivation to
deal with it and put it behind you.
That’s
what happened to Manasseh as we’ll see in a minute.
Transforming Grace
This
year at New Wine, one of the speakers talked about a church
weekend he was invited to lead somewhere up north. And he said he noticed a
woman, possibly in her fifties, seated near the front just radiating the joy of
the Lord. He was struck by her. Her face had the look of someone loved and at
peace. She was so free in worship. She had this kind of aura of spiritual well-being.
She stood out from the crowd.
So
after a few days he asked her if she would tell him a bit about her story.
“Well,” she said, “for many years I was weighed down by guilt and remorse for
something I did.” She didn’t say what it was she’d done and he didn’t ask her
either. “For several decades, I carried around this burden, this weight of
disgrace and shame,” she said.
It
turns out she wasn’t remotely religious, she had no church background at all, and
had never read the Bible… she had no vocabulary to articulate what she felt spiritually.
Her
husband was a lapsed Catholic and he told her that, from what he could
remember, what she had done was a mortal sin, so it couldn’t be forgiven, that
God was ticked off with her and that she was going to hell. Thanks for that,
mate. Why don’t you rub some lemon juice into my paper cut while you’re at it.
It
turns out she used to sometimes go into empty churches and chapels and just cry
about the heaviness that weighed her down. But all she heard was the echo of silence.
She had no peace and no rest; her conscience condemned her. She became
depressed about it and even contemplated suicide.
Then
one day, driving the car to the supermarket she just yelled out, “God, if
you’re there, you’ve got to help me.” And straight away, in her mind she saw
letters and numbers – Romans 3.23. That meant nothing to her at all.
She
went and did her shopping, got back into the car and there again, in her mind’s
eye she saw written down Romans 3.23 and she said to herself “I wonder if
that’s in the Bible?” When she got home she looked it up and found it was from the Bible and this is what she
read: “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God…” She thought,
“That’s me! Yes, I have sinned terribly,
I’ve made some awful mistakes, I’ve messed up my life, I’ve fallen short of the
standard, that’s it!” And then she
read on, “and all are justified freely by his grace through … Jesus.”
And
there and then her life was unmade and remade in an instant. It was as if in
court she had stood in the dock and with a lump in her throat, heard the guilty
verdict, knew it was absolutely correct, only to then hear the Judge say,
“You’re free to go. All the charges have been dropped. Your record has been
wiped clean. The case is closed. Someone has already paid in full your debt to
society.”
This
is grace. This is what God is like.
And
this is what Manasseh, the worst of the worst, discovered. Verses 11-12
describe how he was humbled by a neighbouring superpower. And now that he was
in trouble, he sank to his knees in prayer asking for help. He admitted his
wickedness and asked for mercy from the God whose name he had dragged through
the mud.
After
all he had done, why should God forgive him? Why would anyone? But as he wept
over his past and prayed, God was moved, God’s heart was touched; he saw he was
sincere and truly sorry - and he wiped his record clean and brought him back home.
This
is what the gospel is all about. It’s good news. This is what Jesus came to
demonstrate for us. Some people say “Oh, I could never be a good Christian.”
Listen, Christianity is not about being nice. It's about being new.
“If
anyone is in Christ,” the Bible says, “there is a new creation: the old has
gone, the new is here!”
Some
of you may have seen the video interview on YouTube with a rock singer from the
band Flyleaf called Lacy Sturm. She talks about her tormented years. She says
“I couldn’t get away from my own depression.” She tried a lot of religions and
philosophies. She said “There were all these great ideas but I never found any
tangible healing.” She said “I remember thinking I am tired of the pain in my
heart. I am tired of going to bed and feeling this burden. Who am I? Why am I
alive?”
Bertrand
Russell, the famous atheist, once admitted, “The centre of me is always and
eternally a terrible pain—a curious wild pain—a searching for something beyond what the world contains.”
He
wrote an essay called Why I Am Not a
Christian. But tellingly, when his daughter wrote a biography of her father
she wrote this:
“Somewhere
in the back of my father’s mind and at the bottom of his heart, in the depths
of his soul, there was an empty space that had once been filled by God and he
never found anything else to put in it.”
That’s
what Lacy Sturm felt; the nagging, gnawing emptiness of life without God. The
futility of existence.
One
day Lacy woke up and decided that she was going to commit suicide. She saw no
other alternatives and resolved to end her life at the end of that day. Well, that
evening, by the grace of God, her grandmother whom she lived with, said, “You
are coming to church with me now.” Lacy
said, “I didn’t want to go to church, I hated it, I never went – but look, I’m
going to commit suicide later, it can’t get worse, so I might as well go to
church.”
So
she went. She said, “I hated it - especially the preacher.” [I just thought I’d
include that bit in case any of you can relate to it].
Anyway,
the preacher, as he was speaking had a word from the Lord and so he said,
“There’s someone here with a suicidal spirit.” That got her attention. But she
couldn’t stand what he was saying, so she got up and went to walk out. As she
got to the back of the church a man with a white goatee beard came over to her
and said, “I think the Lord wants me to say something to you.”
She
thought, here we go again. Then he said this; “He wants you to know that even
if you’ve never known your earthly father, [which she hadn’t] he knows your
pain and will be a better father to you than any man could have been. He knows
your pain. He knows what’s in your heart. He’s seen you cry yourself to sleep.
He wants to come and deal with it. He is called The Comforter.”
She
says, “It was as if the God of the universe showed up right in front of me. I
realised that God is holy and good. And that I am not. And that he loves me and he knows I am
tired of the way I have been living and that he wants to make me new - if I
would let him and I said YES! I want that please. And I woke up the next day
with such peace and such joy.”
Ending
That’s
the grace of God. The grace to forgive. That’s why it is precious,
electrifying, and amazing.
I
feel that there are some here want to meet Christ today – maybe for the first
time. Or it may be that you’ve stepped back and wandered off a bit and today is
a day to recommit yourself. I want to lead you in a prayer so let’s pray…
Sermon preached at All Saints' Preston on Tees, 1st November 2015
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