Dr. Rodney Plunket

       There was a time when to light a room you had to put oil into a lamp and light a wick; now we just hit a switch.  There was a time when to cook you had to build a fire; now we simply turn a knob.  There was a time when to travel you either had to walk, mount a horse, or hitch animals to a cart or wagon; now we just turn the ignition key in a car.  There was a time when to wash clothes you had to draw water from a stream or well and you had to manufacture your own soap; now we just throw our clothes into a washing machine with soap out of a box or bottle; we can go off to work and when we get home we can put the clothes in the dryer.

Maybe it’s because so many things in our lives are so easy that we think receiving mercy from God should be easy too.  We sin; we ask God for mercy, we go on our way.  It’s no more difficult than hitting a switch, turning a knob, or inserting a key.  The result?  Our relationship with God is often shallow.  You need forgiveness?  Get baptized or say a little prayer.  Nothing to it.  Hit the switch; turn the knob; insert the key.

But mercy is serious business.  When the Old Testament prophet, Jonah, convicted the city of Nineveh of sin, the people put on itchy, scratchy sackcloth right next to their skin and they did the same to their animals.  The people did not eat and they did not drink, and they did not let their animals eat or drink either.  And everyone participated from the poorest person right up to the king.  God extended mercy to them, but they didn’t just did hit a switch or say a short prayer or take a quick trip to a baptistery.  This mercy thing was serious business.  They knew it, so they behaved accordingly.

If you have your Bible, please turn to Job 42:7-9 and follow along as I read:

After the Lord had spoken these words to Job, the Lord said to Eliphaz the Temanite:  “My wrath is kindled against you and against your two friends; for you have not spoken of me what is right, as my servant Job has.  Now therefore take seven bulls and seven rams, and go to my servant Job, and offer up for yourselves a burnt offering; and my servant Job shall pray for you, for I will accept his prayer not to deal with you according to your folly; for you have not spoken of me what is right, as my servant Job has done.”  So Eliphaz the Temanite and Bildad the Shuhite and Zophar the Naamathite went and did what the Lord had told them; and the Lord accepted Job’s prayer.

It is easy to see that God’s mercy here was not some commodity easily acquired.  These men had spoken incorrectly concerning the nature and working of God.  Forgiveness required a sacrifice that they could not give and prayers, not their own, the prayers of a righteous man.

And this seriousness concerning mercy is also found in the New Testament.  Please turn to Acts 8:14-24 and follow along as I read:

Now when the apostles at Jerusalem heard that Samaria had accepted the word of God, they sent Peter and John to them.  The two went down and prayed for them that they might receive the Holy Spirit (for as yet the Spirit had not come upon any of them; they had only been baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus).  Then Peter and John laid their hands on them, and they received the Holy Spirit.  Now when Simon saw that the Spirit was given through the laying on of the apostles’ hands, he offered them money, saying, “Give me also this power so that anyone on whom I lay my hands may receive the Holy Spirit.”  But Peter said to him, “May your silver perish with you, because you thought you could obtain God’s gift with money!  You have no part or share in this, for your heart is not right before God.  Repent therefore of this wickedness of yours, and pray to the Lord that, if possible, the intent of your heart may be forgiven you.  For I see that you are in the gall of bitterness and the chains of wickedness.”  Simon answered, “Pray for me to the Lord, that nothing of what you have said may happen to me.”

Again, no speedy prayer or hurried ritual.  Instead an ardent plea from a humble heart.

And look again at the passage that was read as our Scripture reading this morning.  In Psalm 51 we read:

You do not delight in sacrifice, or I would bring it; you do not take pleasure in burnt offerings.  The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise.

The people if Israel tried to turn mercy into something one received from God by just hitting a switch.  You offered a sacrifice and went on your way.  The psalmist knows better.  The sinner’s heart must be broken and contrite.  A contrite heart is a heart that is deeply ashamed of past sins and determined to turn away from them.  This is not an easy switch, knob, or key.  This is a profound appeal to the living God.

Christians should all know how serious an appeal for mercy is.  It took the death of Jesus Christ, the very Son of God, for anyone to be forgiven.  We should know that to put faith in that sacrifice and to receive the mercy extended there is serious business.  It is not some casual transaction.  It is real trust flowing out of a broken and contrite heart.

I have been fighting a battle for the past two weeks.  Two weeks ago Saturday, I decided that I needed to address some problems my computer was having.  But I was a babe in the woods.  I thought that I could initialize my hard drive, install a brand new and updated operating system, reinstall my applications and the documents that I backed up and be running with heightened efficiency.

I did not know that there is an initialization of the hard drive that is fairly superficial and an initialization of the hard drive that is much deeper.  So I just found an initialization button, clicked it, and went to work reinstalling.  What I think happened is that due to the relative superficiality of my initialization and also because of corruptions carried by at least one back upped document my computer problems were not improved but worsened.  My fonts were all fuzzy and hard on the eyes.  My system as a whole was unstable and unpredictable.  One application would just quit for no apparent reason causing me to lose recent changes.

I did everything I knew to fix it.  Then I started calling tech support lines.  Nothing helped.  But I did learn about that deeper initialization that does a much better job of erasing everything on a computer’s hard drive so that it is much less likely to corrupt your system again.  It is called a “zero all” initialization.  It actually writes zeroes on every piece of data in your system.  It took about an hour for my computer to zero all the data.  And before I even did that I had to address the fact that there was some data that I did not want lose but that data was almost certainly corrupt.  I learned how to save that data so that the corruptions were peeled off in the process.

There is more that I could tell you, but I think this is enough to let you know that this has been a real battle, a battle against corruptions in my computer’s hard drive.  This has not been easy.  I’m not certain that the battle is over yet.

Sin is like a cancer, a spiritual cancer.  Its effects are far greater than the consequences of my computer troubles.  When I sin I can infect my family, my church family, my friends, and all those around me.  Sin spreads like a bacterium, a virus, a plague.  To remove that infection is no easy task.  That is why God had to pay such a horrible price.  That is why God’s Son had to die such a horrific death.  It is not easy to “zero all” the sins we have committed.  It is not easy to treat us as if we had not committed them.  And a broken and contrite heart must receive this unimaginably expensive gift.  There is no other way.

But we do not will that broken heart.  The gospel is what breaks it.  The love of God is what opens the heart to receive grace and mercy.

Is the gospel of Jesus breaking your heart?  Is the love of God opening the door?  Is Jesus calling you home?

Please say yes to that call. Please come and let us talk to you about receiving the God’s mercy, the mercy given to us through the death of Christ Jesus our Savior and Lord.  Come now as we stand and sing.

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