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| Rev. Brent Russett |
Pastor of Sunnyside Wesleyan Church in
Ottawa:
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PODCAST LINK to CFRA broadcast - Sunday, December 9th, 2012:
http://proxy.autopod.ca/podcasts/chum/6/10149/good_news_030_dec09.mp3
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Broadcast Notes:
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‘Filling
the Potholes’
Good morning and welcome to Good News in the Morning.
This morning our theme is filling the potholes. My name is Brent Russett and it
is my hope that after listening this morning that you will both be encouraged
and you will be encouraged to encourage.
This program is sponsored by Good
News Christian Ministries, Box 184 Rideau Ferry, ON , K0G1W0 – or Google- Good News Christian Ministries and you will
find us.
I grew up half way between Arnprior
and Renfrew just off the trans-Canada highway. When I was a kid that highway
kind f meandered through the countryside, like a cow path through a pasture. It
went west and then it went south and then it went north as if the road planners
had never heard of the adage, the shortest distance between two points is a
straight line.
Around the time I as seven or eight,
bulldozers moved into the neighbourhood. They ploughed through swamps, and
dynamite was used to explode rocks and levelled hills, and there was a swath
cut through the forest and the New Highway was built in a relatively straight
line between Arnprior and Renfrew.
I am going to be looking at a
scripture taken from Mark 1.
1 The beginning of the gospel about Jesus
Christ, the Son of God.
2 It is
written in Isaiah the prophet: "I will send my messenger ahead of you, who
will prepare your way"--
3
"a voice of one calling in the desert, `Prepare the way for the
Lord, make straight paths for him.'"
In other words, build a new highway.
There was a custom of sending out an officer before the king travelled in the
countryside. That officer would make sure the potholes were filled and the ruts
were filled in so that when the king came the journey would be smoother.
The officer that God sent to clear
the road for his son Jesus was John the Baptist. He was to prepare the way,
straighten the road, smooth out the journey so the Son of God would have a
straight run at our hearts.
Interestingly enough, when they
built the new highway in my neighbourhood, they had to rename that old
meandering highway. The powers that be chose to call part of that highway
Russett Drive, because four generations ago, the Russett homestead was located
on that stretch of road.
That road kind of serves as metaphor
for me in my journey towards God. There
is no question that I am journeying towards God, but sometimes to avoid the
rocky hills, and the difficult to navigate swamps, and to stay out of the
forest, I take the road that meanders. While there is no question that I am on
the journey, there is a big questions as to how much closer to God I am now
than I was a year ago.
Maybe you can relate. You do the
right things. You attend church, you engage in worship, during the week you
sometimes read your bible, and pray. You give your money and your time. You
know you are on the journey – you are just not all that sure how far you are
getting.
Some of you feel like a hamster on a
wheel. You are pushing hard in your spiritual life, but not getting very far.
Some of you have pulled over and
parked in your spiritual journey – You are just taking a break trying to get
your bearings.
This is the second Sunday of Advent.
Advent is a season where we prepare our hearts to receive Jesus in a fresh
deeper way. We believe that Jesus came that first Christmas, he comes to us
again and again by his Spirit. The word of God’s call to you is to “prepare the
way for the Lord, make straight paths for him”.
Music Amy Grant – A mighty fortress/ angels we have heard 5:01–
A Christmas Album
This
morning I believe that God wants to give you the keys to the bulldozers, and
teach you how to drive, so that you can fill in the swamps, and level out the
road, and fill in the potholes. And in many ways that’s all that you can do.
You prepare the way, and then you wait, and God comes to you. You make space
for God, and God fills the space.
So
come back with me to Mark chapter 1 Verse 4. Mark 1:4 And so John came,
baptising in the desert region and preaching a baptism of repentance for the
forgiveness of sins.
I have been in this wilderness someplace
between Jerusalem and the Dead Sea. It is a desolate place. Now when we think
river, we think of the Ottawa River. When you think of the Jordan River, think,
big creek. But it is here in this desolate place where John ministered.
He did not choose this place at
random. He preformed his ministry in the wilderness to make a point. The
wilderness in Israel’s history symbolized rebellion and disobedience. You
remember the story of how God led his people out of Egypt, but they disobeyed
God, and they wandered for 40 years in the wilderness. Even in the wilderness,
God’s mercy was there. He fed them every day, he protected them, and he waited,
until his people were ready. To get out of the wilderness they had to change
their mind about who God was, and who they were because of God.
Now John is in the wilderness
preaching a “baptism
of repentance for the forgiveness of sins” What you need to
understand is that this was something out of the ordinary in Israel. Baptism
was something that Gentiles did if they wanted to convert to Judaism. The
baptism of the Gentiles was a ritual washing from all the defilement of their
past.
But now John was asking the Jewish
people, God’s chosen people do something they had never done before. He was
calling all Israel to be baptized as a sign that they recognized their
defilement and need for cleansing.
The baptism by John was a baptism of
repentance. Repentance means turning away from something and going in a new direction.
Here are the keys to the bulldozer.
Repentance is what starts the engine that leads to a smoother road.
I am sure there were people in
Israel that were saying, but wait a minute, we are Abraham’s children. We are
God’s chosen people. We have a very religious culture. And now you have this
man, a way out in the middle of nowhere, and he wants me to act like a Gentile
and admit I’m defiled, and that I need to repent.
There is something in Christian
culture that says repentance is for the really bad people. Repentance is
something that the pimps, and human traffickers, and drug pushers need to do –
but not me. After all I am a nice – and compared to a lot of people I am really
good.
As a pastor, I get a window into a
lot of people’s spiritual lives. Here is what I have observed. The people
furthest down the road on their spiritual journey are the people who are most
familiar with repentance. Repentance isn’t just for people becoming Christian.
Repentance creates a path for Christ to walk into our lives.
Mark tells us how that repentance
started. Verse 5: Mark 1:5 The whole Judean countryside and all the people of
Jerusalem went out to him. Confessing their sins, they were baptized by him in
the Jordan River.
Confession is making a statement
about your life that agrees with what God says about your life. If God calls
something a sin, confession is saying, yes God I agree with you, you are right
I did wrong – And in saying that I acknowledge my need of forgiveness.
Confession opens the door to repentance ---Repentance creates a path for Christ
to walk into our lives.
I love Verse 6’s description of
John. It says “John
wore clothing made of camel's hair, with a leather belt round his waist, and he
ate locusts and wild honey.”
“The reference to John’s clothing
and diet emphasizes that he was not mainstream”. This was not what the fashionable were
wearing in downtown Jerusalem. John the Baptist would not have been welcomed in
the Jericho Hilton or the Jerusalem Hyatt. He was dressed somewhere between
geek and country bumpkin.
And in forcing Israel to go out into
the wilderness, the place that reminded them of their disobedience and sin, and
there preaching confession and repentance, and then asking them to be baptized
– a thing that was only required of the gentiles, - and to be baptized by
someone who was so far away from mainstream that it was hard to find the
tributary he was on – pushed them a way out of their comfort zone.
It says something to us who have a comfortable
spirituality.
It
says that if we want to stop our meandering and make a straight path for our
God that we might have to move beyond what we consider normal. John the Baptist
entered the normal rhythms of life in Israel, and up set them, because people
were going to have to move out of the mainstream if they were going to be ready
to receive Jesus.
This won’t come as news to you, but
we live in a very secular country. Here is what I have discovered, when the
culture around us trumps what God has revealed about himself and how we should
live, --- life gets really warped.
Slavery seemed normal and an
economic necessity until people like Wilberforce and Wesley and a host of
others said, yes this has been our normal – but this isn’t right. Culture trumped
theology, until finally theology trumped culture.
The list could go on and on from the
civil rights movement of the 60’s to South African Apartheid in the 90’s. When
culture trumped theology bad things happened
But it is very easy to point fingers,
but we live in a secular culture –
I wonder what we have made normal
that shouldn’t be. If God would open our eyes to see where we are – then maybe
we could get on the road of confession and start the engine of repentance, and
get off this meandering spirituality and make straight the highway of our God.
Let me see if I can catch some of
the normalcy in our culture.
I think we are prone to judge God
rather than let our culture be judged by God. We try to judge God by science.
Richard Dawkins and his book “the God Delusion” was an attempt to do that. ---I
am all for science, because science is the discovery of what God has put in
place. But should Science progress to a place where it finds a Grand Unified
Theory, and I hope it does, it still will not encompass God; for God moves in a
different realm than science.
God can explain science, by science
will never explain God.
In our culture we are prone to judge
God’s Word by our feeling, instead of letting God’s word have authority over
our feelings, and shine light into our feelings.
The way that gets worked out is we
behave as if God has nothing to say about our sexual activity. We behave as if
God has nothing to say about the use of our time and our money. We behave as if
God has nothing to say about our relationships. But if culture trumps the word
of God, and if your feelings trump that word of God, things get warped.
In this culture we are prone to
judge ourselves and others by cultural standards. Do they look good, are they
educated, can they articulate a proper point of view. You know the list. As you
walk into Christmas parties this year, watch how you assess people. But God
looks at people differently. He loves them deeply. Your value comes from being
a child of God, being made in the image of God, not in your performance and not
by what those around you say. God desires profoundly that they would know him.
And when you judge others on the basis of our cultural standards, life will get
warped.
In fact if you judge, God, his word,
yourself or others on the basis of feelings and circumstances and the cultural
values around you, the spiritual pathway you are on gets warped. You will find
yourself meandering about spiritual: first, this way, and then that way, but
never making a whole lot of progress in your spiritual life.
It is time of you to move away from
the mainstream, be John the Baptist different, and confess your sin and repent.
That is the only way to get off the meandering path.
Music Paul Baloche Just as I am 1:05 – A
Greater Song
Mark 1:8 I baptize you with water, but he will baptize you with
the Holy Spirit."
To be baptized in the Spirit is to
be immersed in the Holy Spirit. Repentance moves us into a place where the
Spirit of God can fill us to over flowing.
And when you are immersed in the
Spirit, there is a love and a joy a peace that is in you. Your heart is marked
by a sense of well being that filters out into all of your life. Where you live
in the situation you are in right now, in a way that brings glory to God, and
the way where you do what you were created to do. You live in a way where you
partner with God in this world to see good things happen, both in you and
around you.
Repentance is the key to getting off
the meandering spiritual life and building in a highway where Jesus can come to
you.
I don’t know if you have been down
Arnprior way lately, but that highway they built when I was a kid, they are now
turning it into a four lane highway. It won’t be long before we can roll faster
between Arnprior and Renfrew.
There are some of you here who have
given Christ a straight run at your life for a long time. You determined long
ago, that what Christ asked for Christ would get. Could it be though that God
wants to expand the highway to your heart, where he and all he wants to bring
you can come rolling in on four lanes.
A little while ago I went for a two
day silent retreat. I do this periodically as a Spiritual discipline. I don’t
know if you have ever been on a silent retreat – with no agenda but there is a
lot of time to fill. I read scripture, I journal, I do some spiritual reading.
But when my heart is calm, I sit before the Lord and say, Lord is there
anything I need to repent of.
Now I tend to keep short accounts
with God. If I blow it, I tend to be fairly quick in confessing my sin, and
agreeing with God and asking for forgiveness. So when I enter into a time like
on this silent retreat, I go in feeling like I am caught up – but it is amazing
when you give God the chance what he will bring to your mind.
God walked through my life and said,
and what about this, and what about this and what about this. But repentance is
the key that builds a highway for the king of glory to come in.
You don’t need to go on a silent
retreat to make this happen. But you do need to make space for God to talk to
you. This advent season, will you take some time before God and say Lord, I
want you to have a straight shot at my heart, I want to be immersed in your
spirit, will you show my heart to me so
I can agree with you and repent.
This morning I would say to you what
John the Baptist said to Israel – Prepare the way for the Lord, make straight paths for
him.
Let’s Pray:
Lord Jesus, we
ask that you would come and that you would show us our heart; that you would show
us what needs to happen in our heart; if there’s anything we need to confess to
you; to repent of. I pray that you would show that to us. We want you to have a
straight shot to our heart on this Christmas season.
We ask, Lord,
that you would walk in our road and that you would draw us deep into the Kingdom
of God.
Lord, I pray that
you would fill our lives with yourself; that you would allow us to be the kind of
people you created us to be; and I ask that you would make us into the people who
are full of love and joy and peace. And Lord, in this season when things get hectic,
I ask Lord that you would help us to walk through the season well, walking with
you.
I ask this in
Jesus’ name. Amen.
Thank you, Listeners for your words of encouragement,
and for keeping us in your prayers. The music today was provided by Salem
Christian Storehouse. Keeping this program on the air continues to be a work of
faith. If you can help with that, please make out a cheque payable to Good News
Christian Ministries, Box 184, Rideau Ferry , On. K0G 1W0.
There now are several ways of accessing our programs.
If you have Rogers Cable, you will find it on Channel 927 at 6:30 on Sunday
mornings as well as over this radio station.
Also I encourage you to visit our Good News Christian Ministries website
and follow us on Twitter or comment on our Blog.
May you know Jesus Christ personally and
profoundly. May the Holy Spirit reside
deep within your heart. And may the heavenly Father surround you with His
constant and abiding and accompanying love.
Music – Michael W Smith – Worship
Again - Give you my heart 3:26
Rev. Brent Russett
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To listen to the above broadcast, click on the
following link:
