(Sermon by Pastor Michael D. Schultz 03/25/07)

INTRODUCTION:

Where have all the good times gone?  Wasn’t life grand in the nineteen-sixties when gas cost $0.28/gal and a stamp cost a nickel!  Wasn’t it great when people used to be courteous, when you could find good help, when TV didn’t have smut and foul language all the time, when Jack Benny and Desi & Lucy were making all of us laugh?  But the good old days, they’re very much in the past, aren’t they?  And what about today?  Anything special about today, Sunday, March 25, 2007?

There’s plenty in the past for which to thank God, but there’s also a sin to which we’re all very susceptible – the sin of dissatisfaction and discontent with the here and now.  It’s the sin we commit when we think or say that God isn’t making my daily existence the fulfilling, exhilarating thing I think it should be.  “Ohhhh, things were so much better when…”  But what does that attitude say to God about the day he’s giving me today?  

People who lived 700 years before Jesus was born were susceptible to the same sin.  So God had Isaiah address them about how they were to view their daily existence.  Should they long for and live in the past, as if that were the only way to survive the present, or did God have something better to offer them?  Let’s pick up on that question and use it today to examine this main point:

The Lord Always Has Something Better In Store For Us

In Isaiah’s day, the reign of David was for the Israelites what the JFK administration was for many Americans – Camelot, an almost storybook life.  But there was something even more grand and glorious in Israelite history before David came along – the deliverance from Egypt.  There were the ten plagues, the exodus out of Egypt, and then that most wondrous of all events, walking through the Red Sea on dry land, walls of water on each side, and then seeing those walls of water collapse in on the pursuing Egyptian enemies, drowning them all at the bottom of the sea.

But even for people in Isaiah’s day 2700 years ago, the Exodus was ancient history.  What about the here and now?  Isaiah addressed that with these words.  If you thought the Red Sea thing was something, what about when God builds a highway through the desert (the one between Israel and Iraq), and plants rivers in that desert, picture language for how God will bring you back to Jerusalem from exile in Babylon.  That will be even greater!  So stop living in the past, you Israelites of Isaiah’s day.  Look what God has in store for you!  Can’t you see it?  

Enslaved in Egypt... Look what God had in store – spectacular deliverance.  Exiled in Babylon... Look what God had in store – spectacular deliverance.  All human beings locked up in the dungeon of sin and death.  Look what God had in store – spectacular deliverance when the Son of God became the Son of Man and gave his life to give everyone eternal life.  You and I born into this world condemned.  Look what God had in store – baptism and the gospel message about Jesus Christ to bring spiritual life and immortality right into these frail mortal bodies of ours.  And where are you today?  Looking back, trying to find something from the past to grab onto to give meaning to today?  Look what God has in store for you – spectacular deliverance from this vale of tears into what one hymnwriter has called the ultimate adventure – the glory of heaven, where seeing Jesus will thrill you forever, and the thrill of it all will never let up.  The Lord always has something better in store for us.  

But look... Look where I’ve been.  Paint on the happy face when I’m in public and go home and sulk and complain when no one can see me.  What should God do to me for the times I have despised his providence with my complaining and for the days I have despised his grace by thinking, “Life stinks!”?  Packaged in with the sin and guilt that killed the Lord Jesus were our discontent and our disillusionment and our dissatisfaction with the physical life and the spiritual life God has given us.  All your sins have been paid for by the death of Jesus.  The life Jesus had was far from glamorous or glitzy, but his was a perfect contentment and satisfaction every day.  That holiness of his was declared to be yours when he rose from the dead Easter morning. 

Take the truth of Christ’s forgiveness granted to you and Christ’s righteousness given to you.  Add to that the truth that the Lord always has something better in store for us.  The result?  We have a living hope.  You don’t have to grasp for things in the past to try to make today tolerable.  Today is a great day.  I am saved by Jesus Christ.  I am headed for heaven, where Jesus has prepared a place for me.  I don’t need to live in the past and moan about the present.  I can thank God for this day as I look forward to that day when I will see his glory and never shed another tear and never attend another funeral and never fill another prescription and never feel another pain.  I can be grateful for this day’s blessings as I look forward to that day when there won’t be a sun in the sky because Jesus’ glory is all the light that heaven needs, when there won’t be a single worry in my heart because the word anxiety is not found in heaven’s dictionary, when there won’t be a Devil to deal with because Jesus will have cast him away forever.  This is the living hope you have in Christ.

So what are you going to do today?  Here’s an answer from God.  Why did God tell the people of Isaiah’s day, when they were dejected and depressed and exiled in Babylon, that he would put rivers and a highway in the desert and bring them back to Jerusalem?  Why has God delivered you from sin through the death of Jesus and promised that you’ll be with the living Jesus forever in heaven?  I provide water in the desert and streams in the wasteland, to give drink to my people, my chosen, the people I formed for myself that they may proclaim my praise.

The Lord always has something better in store for us.  God treated Jesus as my sins deserved and he’s promised me a blessed existence in heaven that I could never have deserved.  Trusting that means this: We know why we’re here – to glorify God for his grace.   Do that today.  Proclaim his praise.  Psalm 23 says, “He leads me in paths of righteousness for his name’s sake.”  The Lord has brought you into the Christian faith that you might be for his glory, everything about you, including how you spend this day.  For your Christian faith right now, forget about Archie and Edith sitting on a piano bench singing, “Those were the days.”  This is the day the Lord has made.  We will rejoice and be glad in it.  

Even if you have nothing of any relative importance scheduled for today, today is important because it’s another day that God would have you use to carry out your reason for being alive – to praise his name.  That happens in a hundred ways.  It happens when you belt out a hymn or when you motionlessly speak a silent prayer.  It happens when you reorganize a room or when you thank the Lord for the meal you’ll eat today.  Today isn’t just what you make of it.  It’s what God has already made of it in Christ, it’s another day that you are God’s child and it’s one day closer to seeing Jesus.  Praise the name of the Lord and have a great day.

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