Scripture: Lamentations 3:1-3,7-9,16-33
I want to make three points in today’s sermon. Number one, fearing worst-case scenarios. Number two, fighting this fear with the “sword of the Spirit.” And Number Three, receiving daily mercies.
But Point Number One… fearing worst-case scenarios…
I used to pastor the Methodist church in Hampton, Georgia, on the south side of Atlanta. And a lot of people who lived around there—south of the Atlanta airport—worked at the airport, or worked for the airlines. Because it’s a lot easier to commute to the airport from the south side of Atlanta than from the north side.
In fact a member of my church was a retired Delta pilot named Bob. And he lived in one of those neighborhoods—there are more than a few on the south side—that literally had a runway on a long patch of grass between houses! In your backyard you could watch planes take off and land. And you could drive your little plane down the street and onto the runway and take off!
And Bob took me up in his plane on several occasions. He took my son Townshend up, too. He even let Townshend “fly” the plane to Stone Mountain and back. I mean, let’s not go crazy… Bob took off and landed the plane. I’m pretty sure that’s the hard part, but still… He offered to let me fly it. But I was not interested. Flying an airplane is one of many things I am perhaps irrationally afraid of. Always have been! I admire people like Dr. Mac McDonald for whom flying planes and helicopters is no big deal. Because… whew! It scares me.
Which is why I need to buy the Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook, which came out many years ago and has been recently updated… It tells us what to do in the event of a worst case scenario… things like escaping from quicksand—which actually isn’t as big a deal as we used to think when I was a kid… Or fending off and surviving a shark attack—I don’t want to have to use that knowledge… Or performing the Heimlich maneuver on yourself—good to know… Or—yes—landing a plane whose pilot is incapacitated.
Of course, “What are the odds you’re going to have access to this book when you really need it?”
But… I credit the author for at least trying to alleviate some of my particular fears.
But I bring this up because I happen to think that many, many of us spend time and mental energy worrying about “worst case scenarios”… And I’m talking about those things that we worry about that never come to pass. After all, if the various “worst case scenarios” I’ve worried about over the years came to pass, I would not be standing here alive right now to preach this sermon! And if your worst-case scenarios came to pass, you wouldn’t be sitting there to hear it!
Ninety-nine point nine percent of the “worst case scenarios” I’ve worried about over the years haven’t come to pass. How about you?
So I want to say a couple ofquick things about “worst case scenarios,” and tie it into today’s scripture: First, just by virtue of being Christians—of being born again through faith in Christ—we’ve already avoided what most people in our world consider to be the “worst case scenario,” which is death itself. We Christians will still die, of course—unless the Second Coming of Christ happens first—but we remember what Christ’s atoning death on the cross makes possible for us: Death has now been transformed. It is no longer “the worst case scenario” because Christ has transformed it into a passageway to an even greater kind of life than we can imagine on this side of eternity.
When the apostle Paul was in prison, facing his own execution, he told his brothers and sisters in Christ at the church in Philippi that he was torn between living in this world and continuing to minister to his friends at Philippi… and going on to be with Jesus. He said if he stayed here, it would be better for them—that is, for his beloved brothers and sisters in Philippi. But if he died, it would better for him… that is, for Paul… much better! In fact, he said, “For to me, to live is Christ and to die is gain.” He said that to die and to be with Christ is “better by far.”1
That’s what happens for Christians immediately after they die: As 2 Corinthians 5:8 puts it, to be “absent from the body” is to be “present with the Lord.”
And that’s not all: After Christ comes again, we all will receive new resurrection bodies—the same kind of body that Jesus Christ himself had after he was resurrected—and we’ll live in a renewed, redeemed, and restored world. This is what we say we believe, for example, in the Apostles’ Creed when we say we believe in the “resurrection of the body.” Or in the Nicene Creed when we say that we “look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come.” That refers to our own future resurrection after the Second Coming.
My point is, because of Christ, death is no longer a worst-case scenario…
Not that death alone should ever be considered the worst-case scenario in the first place. After all, Jesus said, “And do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell.” 2 Apart from faith in Christ, the biggest thing that anyone should fear is not death, but facing Almighty God in final judgment. But as 2 Corinthians 5:21 tells us, “For God made Christ, who never sinned, to be the offering for our sin, so that we could be made right with God through Christ.” 3 Galatians 3:13: “But Christ has rescued us from the curse pronounced by the law. When he was hung on the cross, he took upon himself the curse for our wrongdoing. For it is written in the Scriptures, ‘Cursed is everyone who is hung on a tree.’”4 Romans 8:1: “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.”
I wonder if the author of Lamentations—who is anonymous but traditionally identified as the prophet Jeremiah—so I’m going with Jeremiah… But I wonder if Jeremiah reached a point at which he felt as if he and his fellow Israelites were facing “condemnation” from God. After all, he’s writing after the Babylonians have utterly destroyed Jerusalem and the Temple, after they’ve raped, pillaged, murdered, and maimed so many in Judah, after they’ve captured the nation’s most prominent citizens and taken them into exile in Babylon.
Notice I said the word “felt”… Did he feel as if he were condemned? Because it really didn’t matter what he knew in his head. I mean, he wrote the Book of Jeremiah… He knew that God’s plan all along was to save a remnant of Israel, after 70 years to bring back many from Exile, and ultimately save the world through the Messiah. He knew all that.
But let’s face it: There’s often a big difference between what we know and what we feel. So I wonder how Jeremiah was feeling?
Because look at what he writes in verse 18: “my soul is bereft of peace; I have forgotten what happiness is; so I say, ‘My endurance has perished; so has my hope from the Lord.’”
“So has my hope from the Lord.”
Yikes! That’s a worst case scenario if I’ve ever heard of one! Jeremiah was facing it! He was feeling it!
And sometimes we will, too… It’s a normal part of living a faithful Christian life.
And that’s Point Number One… about worst case scenarios…
Point Number Two: What do we do about it when those feelings come?
We fight them… We fight those feelings until they go away… [REO Speedwagon song… “I Can’t Fight This Feeling Anymore.” But we can! And we must! And today’s scripture shows us how!]
Because please notice… this hopeless feeling Jeremiah feels doesn’t last long. Because look at what he writes just three verses later. Beginning in verse 21: “But this I call to mind, and therefore I have hope: The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases; his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness. ‘The Lord is my portion,’ says my soul, ‘therefore I will hope in him.’”
“But this I call to mind”… In other words, Jeremiah remembers something, and it’s on the basis of what he remembers that he says he now has hope.
And what does he remember? Nothing other than promises from the word of God.
Granted, Jeremiah doesn’t have as much of the Bible as we have, but he has promises from scripture such as Psalm 36:5: “Your steadfast love, O Lord, extends to the heavens, your faithfulness to the clouds.” It never ceases, in other words. He has Psalm 73:26: “My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever.” He has Job 7:17 and 18: “What is man, that you make so much of him, and that you set your heart on him, visit him every morning…”
He remembers these promises and others from the word of God!
Jeremiah fights against feelings of hopelessness by “calling to mind,” or remembering, God’s Word! He fights them with the “sword of the Spirit,” in other words, which Paul tells us in Ephesians 6, is the word of God!
With that in mind, here’s something that I do that has helped me immensely—and maybe something like this will help you, too: I have a so-called journaling Bible. A Bible that’s made to be written in. This one literally has a blank page in between each page of scripture! There are many different kinds of journaling Bibles available in many translations. Of course you could just use a separate notebook if you wanted to. The point is, the practice of literally writing down my thoughts, reflections, meditations, and prayers on scripture as I read it has been very helpful to me. I’m a writer, so that comes naturally to me. I’ve said this before, but I’m hardly exaggerating when I say that nearly every morning—irrespective of whatever scripture I happen to be reading that morning—I feel as if God addresses some specific challenge I’m facing that day! I feel as if he’s talking with me. He’s giving me something that I need—he’s giving me a word that I need—to help me through the day ahead. It’s amazing!
Then, in this same Bible—on the inside covers, front and back—I write down scripture I’ve memorized. And every week I go through and rehearse what I’ve memorized so I don’t forget it!
If I grow old and lose my mind and my memory, I want these scriptures to be the last thing I forget!
Several years ago, when I hired Pastor April to be our associate pastor, the district superintendent at the time—in our previous denomination—sent me another candidate to interview first, before Pastor April. And this other candidate disagreed with something I said. He said, “I’m not much for memorizing scripture, but doesn’t it say somewhere… [dot, dot, dot]?”
Well, it didn’t say “somewhere”… and this man never did find whatever scripture he was looking for… and he also didn’t find a job here at Toccoa First! I expect pastors to know their Bibles better. It’s so incredibly important…
But it’s important for all of us Christians!
Just a few months before he died last year, pastor Tim Keller tweeted the following on Twitter: “Nothing more important for a Christian to do than to read right through the whole Bible over and over and over, at the very least once a year. You have to keep checking and refining your beliefs by immersion in the Scripture.”
And Keller got so much pushback from people—I guess if they knew he would die a few months later they might have maybe given him a break. But in response he tweeted: “It’s fascinating that an exhortation I made all my life to people would be so controversial on Twitter. Never in my 50 years of ministry did anyone ever complain about it—they only thanked me for it.”
He went on to say that his tweet doesn’t deny, for instance, the importance of “loving God and neighbor”—fulfilling the Great Commandment. But as he said, you can’t even know what love is, or what it looks like, apart from scripture! You need scripture to fulfill the Great Commandment, to obey God, to do his will, and to fulfill the Great Commission!
Regardless, these very words of Keller—this very tweet—influenced my decision to have our church read through the Bible in a year—and you yourselves have told me about the fruit of doing so…
And to say the least—getting back to today’s scripture—if we don’t know the Bible, then we’re going to have a difficult time “calling to mind” or remembering these promises when we’re feeling hopeless…
But that’s Point Number Two: Our feelings will often lie to us about God, about ourselves, about reality… We fight against these feelings, however, with the “sword of the Spirit.”
Finally, Point Number Three… Receiving daily mercies. And the scripture I want to highlight comes from verses 22 and 23: “his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning.”
They are new every morning… We receive “new mercies”—in other words, we receive a fresh outpouring of God’s grace—every morning. I heard pastor John Piper’s sermon on this scripture, and he combined these words from Lamentations with Jesus’ words in the Sermon on the Mount—Matthew 6:34—to share an important insight. 5 In Matthew 6:34, please recall, Jesus says the following—and this comes from the NLT: “So don’t worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring its own worries. Today’s trouble is enough for today.”
So… putting these verses together: God gives us, his children, a sufficient amount of grace each day to handle the troubles that God assigns for us on that particular day.
So that hit gospel song back in the ’70s wasn’t wrong: “One Day at a Time, Sweet Jesus.”
Piper asks us to imagine—and it’s just an analogy, let’s not take it too far—but he asks us to imagine that we each have a “grace tank” in our souls. He asks us to imagine that God fills that tank up each morning with all the grace we need to meet the challenges of that particular day. By the time we reach the end of the day… it may very well be that the needle on our “grace gauge” is on empty—meaning, we can’t handle one more bit of trouble. We’re done. We’re empty. We have no more reserves of grace within us. We’ve exhausted it with the troubles that came to us on that particular day.
That’s okay… Our Father knows that we’re on empty… Yet… when we wake up the next day we can be confident that we will once again have enough grace for that particular day.
Our problem often is, we want more grace than just the grace we need for today. We want tomorrow’s grace, in other words, today. Why? Because we’re worried about tomorrow—or next week, or next month, or next year, or ten years from now. We want grace for the worst-case scenario that will likely never happen anyway.
We’re not worried about what happens today. “We can handle today.” But if we can handle today, then praise God! That’s means God has done what he’s promised and given us the grace we need for today.
It’s not for nothing that Jesus also teaches us, in that same chapter, Matthew 6, to pray, “Give us this day our daily bread”—to pray for a sufficient amount of bread to meet my needs for today. Not to pray for a sufficient amount of bread to meet my needs for today and tomorrow. One day at a time!
Also… Remember the manna with which God fed the Israelites in the wilderness? They received a supply of that bread from heaven only one day at a time. And if they tried to take more bread than they needed for that particular day, what happened?
The bread spoiled… The manna spoiled… That lesson points ahead to “give us this day our daily bread.”
I don’t know about you, but I’m usually far more concerned about tomorrow’s bread. Will my bread bread be there waiting for me… tomorrow? Which is another way of saying, “Will God fill up my grace tank so that I’ll be able to face all of my troubles… tomorrow?”
God’s word promises that we can be sure that he will.
What I’m about to say I’m probably saying because I’ve had a couple of funerals in the last week… And death has been on my mind… It’s an occupational hazard for us pastors—not that I’m complaining. We should all think about death more often. As the Bible says, “Teach us to number our days,” after all. 6 But often I feel scared when I think about my own death. Not the part about being in Paradise with Jesus… That’s glorious, of course… And a part of me looks forward to that.
It’s the moment of death that I fear… or the moments leading up to it. And we know from experience that often those moments leading up to it may last months or years.
But I wonder: Will I be ready for it? Will I meet that moment, or those moments, with courage when they come? Will I meet that moment, or those moments, with faith?
But hold on, Brent… Even by having those thoughts, you’re getting ahead of yourself again. God hasn’t given you grace to meet your moment of death because you’re not dying yet!
But our Lord assures us in his Word that when that moment comes, you’ll have exactly enough grace to handle it.
Wait until you get there… Our Lord will be there waiting for you—with all the grace you need—when the time comes.
And if that’s true of our deaths, it’s also true of all the moments between now and then!
Great is Thy faithfulness!
Great is Thy faithfulness!
Morning by morning new mercies I see;
all I have needed Thy hand hath provided:
great is Thy faithfulness, Lord, unto me!
Amen.