If you were a stranger and you wanted to know what is at the heart of this congregation, The First Presbyterian Church of Oskaloosa, Iowa, you’d soon find the answer if you read that Mission booklet.  Take it home and give thanks to God.  We were the church fulfilling our purpose in 2009.

A hospital that has all its beds made and its medical personnel prepared is not a hospital.  It becomes a hospital only when it fulfills its purpose by becoming the avenue through which actual health care flows to the patients.

A school is not a school with the desks all clean and placed in even rows, clean marker boards, shelves lined with textbooks, well trained teachers and a hot lunch ready to serve.  It becomes a school only when it fulfills its purpose by becoming the avenue through which knowledge flows to the students.

The church with the best sermon, flawless music, the building spacious and beautiful and filled with people, becomes the church only when it fulfills its purpose by becoming the avenue through which the love of God flows to the world around it.  

What God has done among us in 2009 is certainly testimony of the fact that God has big plans for us and God has confidence in us that we can hear God’s voice and continue to grow in our relationship to each other and to God.   

This congregation has a heart that is growing in its understanding of its purpose.  We want to be the church that is growing into becoming what God has called us to do.  

We are growing in numbers and we are growing in understanding our ministry together.  We are becoming better at being the avenue through which the love of God flows to the world around us.  

You are part of some of the best times in this congregation’s recent history.  

Last week I talked to you about surrender.  The extent to which we surrender ourselves and our will to what God has in mind will equal the exact amount of progress we will see for the Kingdom of God.

The more of ourselves we surrender, the freer God is to work among us and the faster we will progress in being the avenue through which God’s love flows.  
 
As individual believers we each have a purpose, a reason God has called us into being.  The Westminster Catechism asks the question, “What is the chief end of man?”

The answer is, “The chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy God forever.”  

That tells us the reason we are here on this earth at this time.  We are here to glorify God.  We are here to make knowing God look so good that those around us would want to know God as well.   

What do the people you know and associate with think of God because of you?

Do they see you as manipulative, and demanding?  Is there only one way, and that is your way?  

God calls us to surrender our personal will to what God has in mind.  
Whatever part of our personal life that needs to be infused with God’s presence but we just can’t seem to see it happen, is most likely the part we haven’t surrendered.

Is it family life, a relationship with your children or grandchildren?  Maybe you are so determined to have it your way that God can’t get in.  Maybe you are standing firm on your principles and you need to surrender to God’s principles.
 
There is room for only one throne in your life.  Who is on it?  God will never compete for control.  We cannot glorify God if we haven’t put God in command.

If you demand that relationships go your way, God will let you do it your way.  When you want things to go God’s way, then surrender is always the first step to victory.  

Demanding your way is best?  You are choosing to be held back.  Want real progress in your relationships?  Want victory?  Surrender.  Declare you are not God.  Until then, God will let you struggle with those relationships.

Victory happens not when we fight harder, beat our chest and shout loudly, take a stronger stand and demand our way, but when we let go and give command to God.  

Every day we have the opportunity to see God at work in us and decide to fulfill the purpose for which we have been created, and give even more of ourselves over to becoming what God has in mind.

God has created desire a in us.  Tiger Woods says his Buddhist religion teaches he must fight desire.  Desire is not what got him into trouble.  What got him into trouble is that he hasn’t figured out his purpose in life.  

God made Tiger Woods and gave him abilities for the purpose of glorifying God and enjoying God forever.  Tiger was busy glorifying Tiger.  He sat on the throne and God let him sit there and find out for himself that he is not God.
 
You see God put desire in us, so we would desire to know God and become the “City set on a hill” in the way we relate to God and one another.  Jesus said,

“You are like light for the whole world.  A city built on a hill cannot be hid.  No one lights a lamp and puts it under a bowl; instead it is put on the lampstand, where it gives light for everyone in the house.  In the same way your light must shine before people, so that they may see the good things you do and praise our Father in heaven.” (Matthew 5:14-16, Good News Bible)   

Satan uses desire to call us to go after things.  Satan uses our desire to tell us how our lives can be better if only we put our trust in who we think we are and go after what we think we deserve or what we want to see happen on our terms.  

God, in that unending grace that belongs only to God, keeps reaching out to us, calling us back to God’s purpose for our lives.  God put desire in our hearts so we would want God in our lives and more and more of a relationship to God.  That alone brings the fulfillment our hearts crave.  

Long before the time of Jesus, about seven to eight hundred years before, there was a time in Israel’s history when the people and the government forgot the Lord God.  They went after other gods and erected idols.  Worshipping the Lord God was considered old-fashioned.  The pagan gods were fun and new.  Many of the pagan gods were somehow connected to sexuality, and sex always sells.

Year after year the prophet Jeremiah tried to warn them.  He writes in the 18th Chapter of the Old Testament Book that bears his name:

The Lord said to me, “Go down to the potter’s house where I will give you my message.”

So I went there and saw the potter working at his wheel.  Whenever a piece of pottery turned out imperfect, he would take the clay and make it into something else.  

Then the Lord said to me, “Don’t I have the right to do with you people of Israel what the potter did with the clay?  You are in my hands just like clay in the potter’s hands.  If at any time I say that I am going to uproot, break down, or destroy any nation or kingdom, but then that nation turns from its evil, I will not do what I said I would.  On the other hand, if I say that I am going to plant or build up any nation or kingdom, but then that nation disobeys me and does evil, I will not do what I said I would.  No then, tell the people of Judah of Jerusalem, that I am making plans against them, getting ready to punish them.

“Tell them to stop living sinful lives, to change their ways and the things they are doing.  They will answer, ‘No, why should we?  We will all be just as stubborn and evil as we want to be.’” (Jeremiah 18:1-12, GNB)

Jeremiah kept trying to get Israel to turn back to worship only the Lord God, and the officials grew tired of hearing his sermons of gloom and doom.  They arrested Jeremiah and brought him to trial for telling them bad news.  No one wanted to hear that God would not tolerate being ignored.  It seems this prophet of doom was everywhere, and they were sick of him.  Jeremiah writes in the 26th chapter:

The priests, the prophets, and all the people heard me saying these things in the Temple, and as soon as I had finished all that the Lord commanded me to speak, they grabbed me and shouted, “You ought to be killed for this!  Why have you said in the Lord’s name that this Temple will become like Shiloh and that this city will be destroyed and no one will live in it?” (Jeremiah 26:7-9, GNB)
 
Then I said, “The Lord sent me to proclaim everything that you heard me say against the Temple and against this city.  You must change the way you are living and the things you are doing, and must obey the Lord your God.

“If you do, he will change his mind about the destruction that he said he would bring on you.” (Jeremiah 26:12-13, GNB)
 
The people did not turn back to God.  They kept their precious idols.  They preferred to disobey God.  

Nebuchadnezzar, the king of Babylon, began marching with his army toward the Holy City.  The Israelites heard a powerful king was coming and they ran to the City for refuge.  Everyone wanted to escape to safety behind the strong walls of the Holy City of Jerusalem and be close to the Temple where they believed God dwelled.  

Surely God would save them.  God had to save them.  God promised their ancestor Abraham they would become a great nation.  

Thousands of terrified people began steaming into Jerusalem.  Makeshift housing had to be created because the hotels were soon full.  Extra food had to be gathered, and wood for cooking the food.  They hoped they would be safe inside the walls.  

They believed the foreign king would see the fortified Holy City of Jerusalem and soon grow weary, give up, and go home.

Instead, Nebuchadnezzar and his army arrived and did not grow weary but built ramps up to the top of the wall.  While the army was building its ramps, battering rams, and catapults, that supply of extra food and firewood inside the walls was depleted.

The words of Jeremiah would come true.  For 18 months nothing came into Jerusalem and nothing went out.  Many who trusted in the walls of the Holy City died of starvation, and the survivors became so weak that there was no one strong enough to bury the dead.  No funerals, no one to mourn the dead, only silence.  Human waste, starvation, disease and death produced a powerful stench that would not go away.

The people had been warned, but they would not repent.  Jerusalem collapsed.  The Babylonian army succeeded.  The survivors were carried off into captivity.

If you want to learn more about the hopeless feeling inside those walls read the Old Testament book of Lamentations.

Even though they were warned, they did not turn from their sin, their wickedness, and their idols.

In today’s Scripture, as Jesus was coming to Jerusalem some Pharisees, perhaps those who heard and admired Jesus, came out to tell him, “Leave quickly.  Herod is determined to kill you.  Don’t come into town.  You will regret it.”

Herod, the so-called king, lived to please Rome.  Herod did not live in Jerusalem.  His residence was in Tiberias, a beautiful city he built about 95 miles from Jerusalem and named for the Roman emperor.  Herod put out the word in Jerusalem that when Jesus arrived he was to be arrested.  

Herod was the person who had John the Baptizer killed and now he was going to get Jesus, too?

Jesus knew his time was getting short, and he was going to go about his business until he could not.

This is the only time in the recorded scriptures that Jesus called anyone a name.  He called Herod a fox.  A fox, although sly, is a small animal that can hear a watch ticking forty yards away.  Fox was a good name for Herod.  Like his father, Herod the Great, he thought he was clever and was constantly listening and trying to find out who was trying to take his throne.  

Jesus looked toward the Temple, the place where God-worship was supposed to be the focus.  It was set on a hill high above the city.  Anyone who looked at the Temple had to look up.  It was the most prominent of all the buildings.  

Although beautiful and set high on a hill, the Temple and the city around it had been reduced to a place of political and religious back-room deals and corruption.  No one cared about fulfilling the purpose for which God gave them the land and that beautiful city.  The Temple’s pristine white façade hid the rotting religion within.

That rotting religion would reduce the beautiful Temple and the City to rubble.  

In today’s scripture, Jesus laments over Jerusalem.  He knew that his time on earth was brief.  This place that claimed it was waiting to welcome God’s Messiah was now plotting to kill him.

Jesus saw Jerusalem as a place where the people had been warned but would not heed the warning.  Several had tried before, but the people killed those who did not tell them what they wanted to hear.

God had in mind that Jesus would gather the people as a mother hen gathers her chicks at the first clap of thunder.  But they preferred to face the storm alone.  

We know the rest of the story.  About forty years after Jesus, the storm arrived in full force and that horrible scene of Jeremiah’s day repeated itself.  This time it was Titus the Roman who came and leveled the Holy City.  The survivors were carried off, thousands died, and the Temple was destroyed.  It still has not been rebuilt.

If Jesus were here today, he would point out the rotting religion and the corruption that speaks of our modern-day idolatry.  He would tell us we have twisted the scriptures to fit our prejudices, and point out that our tolerance for sin has polluted our message and weakened the moral fabric of our society.  

He would tell us that he would like to gather us under his wings and protect us from what is coming.

You and I are called to be the light for the world.  “Set on the hill” means God has put us in plain sight for everyone to see.  Being on the hill, we are in a great position to have others see how we make choices and live in the glow that is caused by our surrender to God.  

Everyone has a god.  Even those who are betting there is no God have a god.  There is something or someone they worship.  It is up to me to continue to make the Lord God my God.  It is up to you to continue to choose the Lord God as your God.  
 
How do you know if you are worshiping the real God?  Look at what has the number one priority in your life.  Only you can name what you consider most important.  Serving anything or anyone else in the place of God always spells disaster.

One of the saddest facts is that idolatry not only brought disaster down on Jerusalem.  The greatest tragedy was not the loss of the city of Jerusalem or its beautiful Temple, but that the people missed becoming what God had in mind.  They missed their purpose.  

Jerusalem was designed to be a magnet for God.  It was set high on a hill.  People from all over the world were supposed to travel through that area and, through the witness of God’s people, find this awesome God who created everything that is.

The Jews were put there in that geographical spot to become the nation to embrace the human race and show everyone the path to knowing the Lord God.

They missed it.  They preferred to remain above the rest of the world’s population and consider themselves the “chosen of God,” therefore exempt from trouble and at liberty to import the foreign gods, adopt the standards of the godless societies where all kinds of sin was tolerated.  What could not be tolerated was Jesus reminding them that they had missed the mark.

Religion became the central focus of their worship and nothing could satisfy their desire for more and more of what false gods promised to provide.

This nation in which we live is like a city set on a hill.  There are many individuals who look to the government as the standard.  
Some believe the officials in office can do no wrong.  They are the ones we must trust because they know what is best for us.  

It seems that some in our government work really hard at being godless.  The plain and simple fact is that there is a hollow spot in every person including the politician, good or bad.  That hollow spot is going to be filled.  Their desires are seeking satisfaction.  If there is no God to whom to be ultimately accountable, then we can fill that hollow spot with all kinds of things that have nothing to do with God.

We believe we can be sexually involved with other men and women who are not our spouse.  Better still, don’t get married.  That way you can have whomever you desire.

We can take money from big companies and promise them great things for their profits when we are elected.  We can vote to do anything that makes those who line our pockets prosper.

For the right amount of money, it doesn’t matter if you want a tax break or a loan, or better still a grant for your interest, and we can keep it a secret.  

The people out there paying taxes are too ill informed to know what is good for them.  We will decide.  Many in politics believe there is no accountability, not even to the voters and certainly not to God.  

Friends, the sad fact is Jeremiah was not wrong.  God doesn’t share the God-spot with any other god.   Jeremiah was not popular.  He was arrested for not telling the officials what they wanted to hear.
 
Jesus was not wrong.  He was arrested and killed because he did not tell the religious what they wanted to hear.  That beautiful city set on a hill was obliterated.
 
We are seeing our own society collapse in various ways.  This beautiful country we enjoy is headed for further collapse.  The economy troubles are just a warning.

We know what trouble and chaos happened when two of our buildings went down in flames, crashed into by terrorists.  Besides the terrible loss of the lives of innocent people, and the destruction of property, the whole world suffered as the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were attacked.  Many nations’ economies other than our own suffered.  Still there are terrorists actively riding planes with bombs in their clothes, and plots to blow up subways and who knows what else, all to plunge our nation into chaos.  

Many predict the worst terrorist attack that would do the most harm to the greatest number of people will happen to our communication system.  Think about it.  Less and less is written down.  Many of us depend on the computer for everything.  Much of education is centered not on attaining and retaining knowledge but on how to use technology.  

Ever had a doctor appointment when the clinic computers weren’t working, or been in the grocery store checkout line when the electricity went off?

In our world, so many computers are linked together and so much business is done online.  I have to say it is super-convenient and fast.  We are growing more and more dependent on information technology.  When that system is attacked, what will happen to banking and to government?

That army is marching in our direction.  We can’t ignore it.  The further we get from God, the closer that army is getting.  Idolatry is not only a part of our personal lives, but it is in many respects the guiding factor in our society.  We can’t ignore the fact that ground is rumbling, the army is coming.

What shall we do?    

When the extremists are successful, then we will run to our God and say, “Put me safely behind the wall of your Holy Presence”

The whole world will fall into times of terror where even we who are born in the “land of the free and the home of the brave” will be afraid.  

Jeremiah warns us,

You must change the way you are living and the things you are doing, and must obey the Lord your God.  If you do he will change his mind about the destruction that he said he would bring on you. (Jeremiah 26:7-15, GNB)

So what are we doing up on this hill?  I said a while ago that these are historic times for us, for this part of Christ’s church and for the world where we serve God.  We are either a target for terror or a beacon of hope.   

The determination of which we become is not by how long can we keep nuclear weapons away from terrorists, or how big a wall we can build around this nation, but how much of our hearts we are willing to give to our God.

Jeremiah said that the one thing that could have turned back the armies of Nebuchadnezzar was for the people to turn back to the purpose for which they had been created.  It was all a matter of whom they worshipped.

Jesus said that all the people of Jerusalem had to do was rush under his protective wings, but they would not give up their positions of trying to be number one.

God has put us here for a reason.  God would prefer that we be the beacon, the lit up city set on a hill that brings light to our world.  We can do that only if the light of God’s love shines in us.  That light will draw others to know God, and we will then have the real desire of our hearts and fulfill the purpose God has in mind.

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