First, I want to tell you what my goal is in the minutes we have
together; then tell you how I hope to pursue it, and then pursue
it, and finally bring things to a close with a chance for all of
you to respond with some kind of next step by filling out the cards
in the worship folder and passing them in. I want to be crystal
clear about my intentions so that you can be alert and clearheaded
and make a good assessment of what I say. I have no desire to be
subtle or play games or to sneak up on you with surprises. On top
of our building is a big banner: "Truth Matters." I really believe
it. It matters in Florida right now. It matters in your life. And
it matters right now not only in what I say, but how I say it.
Jesus said, "You will know the truth, and the truth will make you
free" (John 8:32).

First, then, my goal is to persuade you that the Biblical,
Christian diagnosis of our condition as humans is true and deeply
relevant to your life, and that the remedy that God has given in
the death and resurrection of his Son Jesus Christ is perfect for
our condition and is found nowhere else but in him.

Second, the way I hope to pursue this is to read a passage of
Scripture and comment on it; connect it with an experience I had in
South Carolina on Thursday and Friday; show how this raises the
issue of God and sin and salvation and faith; and finally, to
outline the Christian message of hope in Jesus Christ from the
Bible itself.

"Life Is Hard, and God is Good"

So let's pursue it. The text I want to read with you is
Lamentations 3:21-25. Many of you will not be very familiar with
this little book in the Old Testament. It was written by the
prophet Jeremiah in response to the destruction of Jerusalem by the
Babylonians in about 587 BC. It tells us of the horrible
destruction and loss of life and starvation through siege. But in
the middle of the book (Lamentations 3:21-25) there are some of the
sweetest words that God has given to us about himself. Jeremiah
says,

21 This I recall to my mind,

Therefore I have hope.

22 The LORD'S lovingkindnesses indeed never cease,

For His compassions [mercies] never fail.

23 They are new every morning;

Great is Your faithfulness.

24 "The LORD is my portion," says my soul,

"Therefore I have hope in Him."

25 The LORD is good to those who wait for Him,

To the person who seeks Him.

Then, in a partial explanation of how this can be, in the midst
of great suffering, Jeremiah says in verses 32-33,

32 For if He [God] causes grief,

Then He will have compassion

According to His abundant lovingkindness.

33 For He does not afflict willingly

Or grieve the sons of men.

This means that the mercies of God are often hidden and hard to
recognize when they are happening. He does "cause grief" (verse
32). He does "afflict" (verse 33). But all this serves another
purpose – a merciful purpose – if we trust him.

It's the same as the lesson in the book of Job, who lost
everything. James, the brother of the Jesus, wrote in James 5:11,
"You have heard of the endurance of Job and have seen the outcome
of the Lord's dealings, that the Lord is full of compassion and is
merciful." In all his afflictions, the aim was mercy. So it was in
the destruction of Jerusalem for all who would turn to God and
trust him.

You could sum it up the way Susan Shelley did when her son was
born at 8:20 PM November 22, 1991 (just before Thanksgiving), and
died at 8:22 PM – two minutes later. The nurse asked, "Do you
have a name for the baby?" And Susan said, "Toby. It's short for a
Biblical name, Tobaiah, which means, 'God is good.'" (See Marshall
Shelley, "Two Minutes to Eternity" in Christian Reader,
Sept/Oct, 1995). And when her husband Marshall told the story at a
Wheaton College Alumni meeting, he summed up his talk, "Life is
hard, and God is good." That's Lamentations.

O that we had eyes to see the mercies of God in our lives! How
we would thank him, and trust him with our future. Especially if we
knew the price he paid in the death of Jesus to take away our guilt
and make it just for him to give everlasting mercies to sinners who
trust him.

The Mercies of God in Childhood

I felt this very powerfully on Friday morning. I had flown to
Greenville, South Carolina, to visit my stepmother and to help my
father make some adjustments to living alone after she had moved
into a nursing home. When my visit was over I left his house with
enough time to drive by some of the places where I grew up.
Everywhere I looked I saw the mercies of Christ.

Just beyond the old Coca-Cola bottling plant, boarded up now,
was the office where my mother sent me to a dermatologist because I
had acne so bad in high school. He would burn me with a lamp, then
rub dry ice on my skin and then poke me until I looked like a boxer
when I drove home. And I thought as I drove by: It was a mercy. It
cut me off the fast track of popularity and girls, and made me look
to God for help and hope. It was hard and it was good.

I drove through what was once called the "black section" and I
remembered with shame my own participation in racist attitudes and
behaviors. I felt shame again. But then I thought about the path
where God has led me until today, and all I see is mercy. I have
sinned and God has had mercy.

I drove by Billy Shaughnessy's house and looked at that front
yard where we used to play tackle football (never touch or flag,
always tackle). And I recalled that Saturday morning when we
tackled Billy and broke his neck, but after weeks in a brace there
was no paralysis. And I thanked God for his mercies, not mainly
that I have not been killed or seriously injured, but that
I have never killed anyone else or injured them
permanently. That too is a great mercy from God.

Two blocks later I parked in front of the house where I grew up,
122 Bradley Boulevard. I got out so the smells would mingle with
the sights. My mother and father designed and built the house in
1951. I was six when we moved in. I grew up there. All my childhood
and teenage memories are there. I don't know who lives there now. I
didn't have time to ask. I just looked. The blue spruce is gone.
The crabapple tree is gone. The shrubs are all different. But the
dogwood tree is still there forty-eight years later – about
twelve inches thick now instead of four inches. And I thought of
all the lonely and happy days sitting out on the grass under it,
looking over Dellwood Valley to Piney Mountain and composing poems,
because that seemed to give some shape and meaning to my feelings.
O what a mercy from God that he met me there again and again, and
gave me hope.

Finally, I drove to the cemetery where my mother was buried in
1974 after being killed in a bus accident. I was a little ashamed
that it took me five minutes to find the brass headstone. But shame
gave way to the sweetest gratitude as I stood there alone and let
myself have a good fifty-four-year-old cry – as I poured out
my heart in thanks to God for his mercies to me in twenty-eight
years of faithful mothering. Yes, the loss at twenty-eight was
hard. But God was good.

O how many are the mercies of God in our lives – even in
the hardest experiences!

But Those Mercies Are All Over and Past

Now here is what gives all this a relevance for what I am trying
to do in this message: it raised with tremendous force the issue of
God and sin and salvation and faith – and whether a sinner
like me can hope for anything that is permanently
satisfying. It happened like this. All those experiences –
and I only gave you a fraction of them – all those remembered
mercies of God were overshadowed by a moment that had happened
earlier that morning. My father had left to go to a meeting, and I
was about to leave on the drive I just described to you. I stood
there on the sun porch looking out over the backyard of a house
that I have visited now almost yearly for twenty-five years –
my father will celebrate his twenty-fifth wedding anniversary
December 6. That's twenty-five more years after thirty-six years of
marriage to my mother.

I thought to myself: LaVonne (my stepmother) has left this house
and will probably never live here again. Daddy is alone, and who
knows when he will move out, or go to be with Jesus. Soon, I will
stand here for the last time, clear out the things that are his,
and this twenty-five-year chapter of life will be over. And I will
never enter this house again.

And the question rose in my heart – almost like a cry of
rebellion – Lord, is this all that life is – the
accumulation of memories? The closing of one chapter after another?
And as we move to the end of our lives, more and more life lies
behind and less and less lies before, so that the closing of every
chapter becomes more and more painful?

Or does this very ache in our heart – this reflex of
rebellion against the closing of chapters – signify that we
are made for something more? Something future? Something permanent?
Has God, as Ecclesiastes 3:11 says, "set eternity in [our] heart"?
Is this immense longing in my heart to experience something
precious and deep and true and beautiful and personal and
satisfying that is permanent and not passing away – is that
longing just an evolutionary,
chemical development with no more
personal significance than an upset stomach?

And at that moment, standing on that porch, I rejoiced that God
has made known to us in his Word, the Bible, that we can belong to
a kingdom, and a family that is permanent, and that not even death
will separate us from him and from all those who trust him, and
that his mercies will be new every morning forever and ever, and
there will be no more sense of loss. No painful endings
anymore.

No More Painful Endings

So let me take the closing minutes to summarize the Christian
message of hope in Jesus Christ, that answers this tremendous
longing in the heart of every person.

First, the Bible teaches that you and I are created in the image
of God. Genesis 1:27, "God created man in His own image, in the
image of God He created him; male and female He created them." This
is why we are so different from the animals. All that makes your
life personal, rather than mechanistic – all your love and
all your sense of justice and duty and right and wrong and all your
regrets and dreams – are the echo of the image of God in you
and prove to your own conscience that you are a person in the
presence of a living Creator, and not a accidental accumulation of
chemical reactions. The Bible answers this huge question of why and
how we are different from the animals, and have such struggles in
our souls between the passing of time and the presence of eternity.
We are in God's image and were made for God.

Second, the Bible teaches that we have sinned against God, and
so it gives us an explanation of what is going on inside of us when
we look back over our lives and feel so much regret – that it
could have been so different, we could have done so much more, we
could have loved so much better – and when we look forward
into the future and feel so much dread (in our really honest,
far-seeing moments). What are these deep feelings of failure and
fear? They are the merciful gift of God telling us that we are
sinners in need of a Savior. We have sinned. And we will sin again.
And God is holy and just and pure and cannot look on sin. And
therefore we are estranged and alienated from the very One for whom
we were made. This is the explanation of the great turmoil of the
human soul. This is what makes the Bible ring so true. Its
identification of who we are and its diagnosis of our condition are
so accurate!

Third, the Bible shows us what God has done, in his great mercy
and love, to save us from our sin and reconcile us to himself, and
give us freedom from the curse of remorse and fear, and give us
hope for everlasting joy. Permanent joy. Permanent personal
relationships that will never end – because they will all be
rooted in him. And what he has done is send his Son, Jesus Christ,
into the world to die for our sins and rise again so that we might
be forgiven and rise with him someday into the unshakable
permanence of the children of God.

O how many texts there are to teach this truth. This is the
heart of the Christian gospel – that Christ came into the
world to save sinners, as Paul said in 1 Timothy 1:15, "It is a
trustworthy statement, deserving full acceptance, that Christ Jesus
came into the world to save sinners, among whom I am foremost of
all." John 3:16, "For God so loved the world, that He gave
His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not
perish, but have eternal life." 1 Peter 3:18, "Christ also died for
sins once for all, the just for the unjust, so that He might bring
us to God."

For while we were still helpless, at the right time Christ died
for the ungodly. For one will hardly die for a righteous man;
though perhaps for the good man someone would dare even to die. But
God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were yet
sinners, Christ died for us. Much more then, having now been
justified by His blood, we shall be saved from the wrath of God
through Him. For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God
through the death of His Son, much more, having been reconciled, we
shall be saved by His life. (Romans 5:6-10)

There is no other religion whose diagnosis of our condition is
more penetrating and true to life than Biblical Christianity. And
there is no other religion that offers a remedy for real guilt and
real remorse and real rebellion and real, deserved alienation from
God, and real, deserved fear of the future. Only Christianity shows
us that God has made a way for himself to be both just and the
justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus. When Christ died for
our sins and rose again, God's honor and God's righteousness were
vindicated. And in the very same act, Christ became my substitute:
he bore the punishment of my sin, and he completed the demand for
my righteousness. He has done what I never could do: bear my sins
and be my righteousness.

Your Treasure

Which leaves one last point. To experience this gift of God,
through Jesus Christ, you must receive it as the treasure of your
life. And that is what I am praying you will do. Jesus' apostle,
John, said, "As many as received Him, to them He gave the
right to become children of God, even to those who believe in His
name" (John 1:12). And the apostle Paul said, "By grace you have
been saved through faith; and that not of yourselves, it
is the gift of God; not as a result of works, so that no one may
boast" (Ephesians 2:8-9).

So here we are standing on the sun porch alone. The house is
empty. The chapter is closing – perhaps ten years, or
twenty-five, or fifty – and God has brought you here today to
hear his Word, his diagnosis of your soul and his remedy for your
condition, and mine. You were made in God's image, to know him and
trust him and love him and enjoy him and follow him and to live
with him permanently forever. All of us have strayed from this
destiny. Christ came to bring us back. I pray that you will
come.