First Presbyterian Church, Jackson, Mississippi Evening Service

And we hear about love a lot. “All you need is love.” “What the world needs now is love.” “In the name of love.” “What’s love got to do with it?” We think we know what love is. Love is so basic, it’s so elementary; it’s timeless and universal. The need for love is undeniable and so we think about love and we read about love and we write about it and we talk about it and we sing about it. But how often, and how well do we actually practice love? Well 1 Corinthians chapter 13 is the definitive chapter on love in the Bible. 

This evening we begin a short series looking at various texts that speak to us about the familiar New Testament triad of Christian virtues that sort of together sum up so much of the Christian life - faith, hope and love. And to kick things off tonight we’re looking at Romans chapter 5 and we’ll think about verses 1 through 8 together. A brief glance at the text will immediately demonstrate this is an extraordinary paragraph, so full of riches. The distinct work of each of the three persons of the blessed Trinity is mentioned here. Our past - “we have been justified.” Our present - “we now have peace with God; we now have access into this grace in which we stand.” Our future - “the hope of glory; a hope that does not put us to shame.”

So we’re finishing our mini-series tonight on the story of Abram and we’re in Genesis 14. And at the center of Genesis 14 is the story of Melchizedek. And one popular Old Testament scholar today says that “Melchizedek is the most complex subject in all of Biblical studies.” And so it’s kind of silly to do thirty minutes on Melchizedek, but that’s what we have. And we’re going to do - dip our toe into the water a little bit and highlight some of the main ideas. Melchizedek shows up in five chapters of the Bible - Genesis 14, Psalm 110, Hebrews 5, 6, and 7. And it’s no secret that the New Testament connects Melchizedek to Jesus Christ in some way. He’s a successor, that’s the word that’s used, after the order of Melchizedek. And so like going into Isaiah and looking at the Servant songs in Isaiah, like Isaiah 53, you can actually go back to the Old Testament, go back to Genesis 14 and Psalm 110 and learn new things about Jesus Christ, even from the Old Testament. 

We are in a mini-series on the life of Abraham and tonight we will be in Genesis chapter 13. Well what do we have here? What’s going on in this passage? And it might not seem like it, but you can actually peer here into the very essence of human sin, into the very essence of our sin, of humanity’s sin. So we’re going to look at three things tonight - the wrong garden, the sin of the garden, and hope found in another garden.

So this story is about Abraham going down to Egypt at the beginning and then getting kicked out of Egypt at the end. And in the middle, God steps in, God intervenes, God imposes, God comes to fix Abram’s mess. And so we’re just going to think about two lessons tonight. The first is that God intervenes, and the second is that God intervenes for a purpose, for a reason.

There are times, there are times for all of us aren’t there, when what gets out, where what gets found out, where what you were hiding that was a secret that was kept in the dark, there are times where those things are exposed and you’re unglued. And it’s not fun and light, but it’s heavy and there are real consequences. This psalm is written after that happened to King David. So Psalm 32, “Singing our Failure.” We’ll consider the journey home in verses 1 to 5. And second, verses 6 to 11, the joy of home. And so the journey home and the joy of home. The journey home, verses 1 to 5, and then the joy of home in verses 6 to 11. 

Charles Spurgeon called Psalm 23, “the pearl of the Psalms.” And so long before Michael Jordan, long before LeBron James and long before David Beckham and long before Ryne Sandberg, King David had his own number 23. And this is a psalm that maybe for you is the most beloved psalm in the Psalter. Maybe this is your most favorite passage in all of Scripture. Maybe this is a passage that was cross-stitched at your grandmother’s house. Maybe this was a psalm that was read or a psalm that was prayed at the funeral of someone that you dearly loved. This maybe is a text that was read to you or read to someone that you love in the hospital. Maybe before a baby was born or maybe in deep fear, this was a passage that was maybe a balm for your soul, medicine for your soul in the dark night. Whatever way God has used it in your life, it’s certainly a passage that can bring with it a flood of memories. 

That’s the beginning of the book, Lament for a Son, written by Nicholas Wolterstorff who was a former philosophy professor at Yale University. But he writes the book not as a scholar; he writes the book as a loving father. He writes the book for his twenty-five year old son who died mountain climbing in Austria. And he calls the book his lament - Lament for a Son. His expression of sadness, this prayer of mourning for his late son, Eric. And as you continue reading you can hear the sadness in this father’s words. He says, “There is a hole in the world now. In the place where Eric was, there is now just nothing. There is nobody who saw just what he saw, who knows what he knew, who remembers what he remembered, who loves what he loved. My son is gone. Only a hole remains.”

And before we jump in and read, something to orient us to our text tonight. The New York Times bestseller, The Boys in the Boat by Daniel James Brown, is the story of the rowing team at the University of Washington in Seattle and their quest for gold at the 1936 Olympics, which took place in Berlin, Germany. And it’s these college guys from working and middle-class families, the sons of loggers, the sons of farmers, these college guys who beat the odds in the most desperate of times, on the heels of the Great Depression and just before WWII. It’s the story of how they beat the odds. And they rowed their way into Berlin, into the Olympics; they raced in front of Hitler and the Nazis and 75,000 Germans. And after the Germans dominated on the water winning five gold medals and one silver in the six races preceding the 8-oar final, the 8-man competition at the end, these college guys beat the favorites. They beat the Germans on their home turf and they won gold.

This past year at First Presbyterian Church we have been immersed in our theme of “Rooted.” What does it mean to be in union with Jesus Christ? More specifically, we’ve been looking at some of the questions - How do I get into union with Jesus Christ? How does our union impact our identity and our ongoing transformation into the likeness of Jesus? And on top of that, what are the right covenant blessings that are ours as a result of our union with the Lord Jesus? And one of the great benefits, one of the great benefits that does arise from our union is the beautiful if not magnificent doctrine of the believer’s adoption into the family of God - a doctrine which teaches us that we are no longer enemies but we are now friends; more than friends, we are sons and daughters of the Most High, never to be discarded into exile once again. At the same time, it also teaches us and reminds us that we have received the Spirit of Christ and we are recipients of every spiritual blessing in the Lord Jesus Christ Himself. An