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“Joy
in Heaven”
a sermon by
Thomas L. Jenkins
Text: Luke 15:1-10
“Just so, I tell you, there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner
who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no
repentance.”
DEAR SISTERS AND BROTHERS, I wonder how many angels in heaven will be
celebrating and partying about us, for the rest of this day (not just
because we got the sanctuary painted)? This chapter, 15, in Luke’s
Gospel may actually be one of the most fascinating parts of the whole
Bible.
I have always loved having big and deep thoughts about God’s love for
us. God is not restricted
to time, as we are: God does not live by a clock.
God is in every human being, surrounding every human being;
individually focused on each one of us.
When Jesus was dying on the cross, in his heart, he was dying for
you—personally. I think
that when he was dying he was looking right at you.
And if I am not right, then his engagement with you was even more
individually personal. If
I’m not exactly right, it is because I am falling short.
The Bible tells us that God has counted every hair on our heads. And, in
this story we just read from Luke, we are being shown that every time we
experience real repentance in our lives here and now, there is joy in
the presence of the angels of God.
In Hebrews it reads, “Do not
neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have
entertained angels without knowing it.” (13:2)
I have always thought these words indicated that some stranger, whom we
think is a human, may very well be an angel in human form.
Maybe it does. But,
maybe the angels in heaven are entertained because our showing
hospitality to a stranger really is a form of our personal repentance.
The kind of religious leaders that the Pharisees and scribes were in
those days would actually say, “There will be joy in heaven over one
sinner who is obliterated before God.”
They were thinking that the angels in heaven would be filled with
joy when a sinner was wasted back to nothing, because they thought this
was a characteristic of God.
Before the true gospel had come out, and even today when religion is
emphasized, this picture of God as being filled with wrath and anger
toward sinners who deserve his punishment because of wrong beliefs and
disobedient actions, is how we often think about God.
One of the most classical pieces of literature, even published in many
of our public school textbooks, is a sermon by Jonathan Edwards,
entitled, “Sinners in the Hands of God.”
Edwards has a picture of God, holding us in his hands, like a
bridge over the fire of hell, and that he could open his hands and we
would be dropped into this eternal fire. Having this picture in our minds, do we think that God is
holding us over the fire, and that if we do not get good enough, then
God is going to drop us in the fire?
Or, do we think that God has already reached down into the fire,
put us in his hands, and is pulling us up out of the pit, to set our
feet upon a rock, and make our footsteps firm? If we are drowning, we
could not pull ourselves, out of the water, by our own hair.
One of the greatest repentances that we may experience, that leads to
enormous joy in heaven, is to come to see and believe that God the
Father is not filled with anger and wrathful judgment toward us, even
when we are caught up in real times of sin.
God does have anger, and God does have wrath, but they are never
directed at you. God hates evil, the devil, Satan, and sin.
God’s wrath is always toward the very dark power in our lives
that turns us to seeing God as the ground of all being who has joy in
obliterating a sinner.
God chose to take the judgment against sin upon himself. And God chose
to be the one, upon whom the strongest force of the devil could be
applied to. Both of these were God’s election for you and me and each
one of us, so that we would come to know God and ourselves in the
newness of Jesus Christ.
Out of the statement about God, regarding heavenly joy over sinners to
be obliterated, and the whole notion that the proper religion is
required to make us right with God, comes the implication that
repentance is totally about stopping certain immoral actions.
We think of repentance as finally becoming sorry for behaving in
a certain way, and then totally changing that way: stop getting drunk,
stop abusing others, stop looking at pornography, stop being a liar, and
stopping embezzlement. Yes,
for some person to finally see the wrong in some act like these and many
more, and to stop them is a good thing.
It is a form of repentance in the sense that someone has turned
around and is now going in a totally different direction than they were
before.
However, the repentance that is being talked about in Luke’s passage,
that brings celebrating joy into the lives of heavenly angels, is the
change of mind that happens in us, as God the Holy Spirit gives to us
the same way of knowing God the Father as Jesus Christ has.
Obviously, Jesus is being grumbled about because he is hanging out with
the sinners and tax collectors. He
likes them as human beings. And
even though they are not as legally involved in trying to get right with
God as the religious leaders are, they in their real humanity may very
well be closer to realizing the truth about God.
C.S. Lewis wrote: “Prostitutes are in no danger of finding their
present life so satisfactory that they cannot turn to God: the proud,
the avaricious, the self-righteous, are in that danger.”
Jesus is the Good Shepherd. And,
God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit are one.
This picture of a shepherd leaving 99 sheep to find one missing
sheep, and this illustration of the lady spending all she could to find
her missing coin, are both pictures of God searching for us and finding
us in Jesus Christ.
God’s loving us is God being concerned about seeking and creating a
relationship with us that is personal, without any requirement of our
aptitude or how worthy we are. The
miracle of the almighty love of God is that God is light in darkness and
that God has worked out how to seek for us and find us and take us back
home with Him.
My son, Tommy, has the mounted head of a deer I shot one time when I was
hunting. The taxidermy was
provided by a bother of mine in the church. After I thought I had shot
the deer, I sat down for about twenty minutes.
Then, I walked down to where I figured it was standing, and I did
not see it. So, I walked
off in the direction I thought it might have run.
I search for many miles and a number of hours, walking miles out
into the woods. I actually
got lost a little while as I was looking for the dear.
Then I finally got back to where I had originated.
I stood there again, and look at where I thought the deer had
been. I walked back down
the hill, about 75 yards. And
then when I was where I thought he was shot, instead of walking off in
the direction I thought he would have run in, I simply walked 15 yards
more behind where I was standing. There
I found the deer. I had
looked everywhere for him over about two or three hours, when all the
time, he was right where I started.
The angels in heaven celebrate with joy when they see that our best
repentance is not that we have to find God in our lives, but that God
has already found us in Jesus Christ.
Let us pray…
Amen
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